I always wonder with archaeology how often we are finding remains in their natural habitat versus 'comedy of errors' situations.
Did those dinosaurs really live near mud flats, or were they driven there by severe drought followed by torrential rains? Or was it part of a migration route driven by repeating cycles of drought and rain? (the fact that they are under many, many layers of sedimentary rock suggests the latter)
Similarly, were hominids living in that cave a plan A, plan B, or plan C? Plan B could be a "Helm's Deep" situation, where you go there when something goes wrong. While Plan C could be an 'any port in a storm' situation where unexpected weather caught you in an area you did not mean to stay.
Plan A might have been a biologically active region where life devours anything that stops moving for too long, the same way we have trouble finding evidence of these huge cultures in Central and South America.
As you'd expect, this is a well-known problem. We call them 'formation processes'. There's a rich literature out there, but always more to explore because there's no general solution.
I just visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, and thankfully there is quite a bit of display real estate devoted to mentioning things like this. For example, one talks about how the initial hypothesis about a particular dinosaur had them die during river crossing, but later research suggests they were probably washed into the river during floods, based on the likelihood of them residing a great distance away.
I always try to remember how bloody long the dinosaurs were around. It is hard to imagine the scale of 100 million years - As a comparison, imagine every person who has ever lived lived in the same town. How many bodies would be buried in the silt at the bottom of the lake?
If you have a wide defintion of religion, one could argue that is the case.
Because most who go (and die) there, have no fun doing it.
There are plenty of beautiful mountains, but most just want to stand on this particular mountain (sometimes after being dragged up there), because of some numbers. Not because of the mountain.
Mountaineering is literally a mountain cult (non-pejoratively) so this wouldn't even be inaccurate once you translate "religion" into anthropological terms.
Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts.
Then I remember how we treat animals in general and it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable and I stop thinking those hypothesis are so fascinating.
Just because science says Denisovans are a subspecies of humans doesn't mean human societies would see it like that.
Women have only been allowed to vote for about 100 years. It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold.
We are good at defining the boundary socially, rather than scientifically. Who knows, perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. Certainly, there's some hope in that violence has lessened over recent decades.
> third world, the second one was the soviet block (it was an alignment thing, not a poverty thing).
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."[0]
The difference between the first and second world was a objective distinction in prosperity experienced by inhabitants in the different systems.[0] The first world capital allocation was several orders of magnitude more efficient than the Soviet block.
Sure, I leave in a former communist country, this isn't news to me.
But the expression "third world" arose to mean "neither NATO nor Warsaw pact" and only later started to mean "poor" because most of the countries in this group were. See wikipedia's references[0]. There were poorer countries in the communist block, and richer non-aligned ones.
Well, the status of quite some illegal immigrants, who owe the smugglers a lot, who need to work and who therefore cannot refuse a work and who cannot go to the police - is probably quite close to that of original slaves.
They aren’t talking about Japanese women but Japanese Americans in general. There point is just because women got to vote doesn’t mean they were allowed to. Furthermore a big reason women got to vote, initially, is that married men thought they were getting an extra vote out of the deal (luckily women are individuals and that wasn’t the case.)
> perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime.
At some point, there's the very real possibility that vat-grown meat may become a main staple.
It sounds a bit icky, but think about it: We could have flavors and textures of meat that were never available in nature (and maybe also some horrific mistakes). It's entirely possible that we could have "top-shelf vat" brands that sell for more than farm-raised.
Of course, the biomass to create the foodstuff needs to come from somewhere...Soylent Green?
Well, they still start from real animal cells, from what I understand.
As a vegan, I'd have that dilemma. If I was an utilitarian, I'd probably justify it more clearly.
In the meanwhile, I'm quite happy with vegetable based "meat". It was definitely harder to be vegan 10 years ago (social interaction somehow demands a certain diet), and especially here in Spain.
Now it's really easy and confinement makes it easier too.
As far as I am aware they don't need to harm the origin animal when they take the cell, and they only need to do it once at the start and can then reproduce the cells from the lab grown meat. But I could be very wrong. I am perfectly happy with plant based "meat" myself, too. By the way, I had a really hard time finding vegan food in Spain (outside of Barcelona) when I visited. Out of desperation I tried to get a veggie burger in McDonald's (I know not vegan, I was desperate) and they didn't have one! Barcelona however was awesome for vegan food.
I understand your pain finding vegan food outside from Barcelona (where I live, btw). Even in Madrid is not that easy, despite being the capital and biggest city.
I'm sure not harming is better than harming, I agree. Nevertheless, they are used as tools. I know this might sound like a tree hugger, hippy argument but, would anyone like to be in that situation against their will when it's really not necessary? That's my moral dilemma :)
Not at all, I completely agree. I personally wont be eating lab meat, partly for that reason and partly because I don't feel like I need to. At this point real meat, even if lab grown, would probably seem to disgusting to me.
That's a question I do to myself. Can I detach a flavour from what it used to mean?
When I think about it rationally I come to the conclusion that I should be able to enjoy a flavour, any flavour, if it carries no harm. But we both know there's also an emotional component, which I might share too.
It's an interesting topic I don't think I have yet reached a conclusion about.
What's the vegan reason to not eat lab grown meat? No animal was harmed or even involved in the production of the meat. It's morally equivalent to greenhouse grown plants IMO.
Not the op, but not all vegans have animal cruelty as their primary concern. Many do it for health reasons and avoid ingesting animal proteins in general, regardless of how they were produced.
Take in consideration that being vegan is considered something that goes beyond diet. It takes you to decide on pretty much anything you buy or consume (it took me some time, for instance, finding a strap for my 6 strings bass guitar that wasn't made out of leather).
(Btw, do you call it strap or did I just make that out?)
I'd argue that the majority of vegans do it, at least partially, for animal reasons. I started to see how it would affect health but quickly enjoyed the peace I felt from not harming animals
Sorry to nitpick, but if someone chooses to not eat animal products for a reason other than animal welfare, they are not vegan, but rather "eating plant based" or whatever they want to call it. Being vegan is more than about what you eat, it's trying to live in a way that reduces as much as possible the cruelty to other animals from one's own lifestyle. e.g. don't eat animal products, don't wear animal products, don't use products tested on animals.
It's where those initial cells were taken from, that's all.
It's not that labs create cells from scratch but rather they efficiently reproduce then.
It would demand a constant source of reliable cells from animals, from what I understand.
Now, personally, do I think this is better than the current situation? Probably yes, but it's an utilitarian reasoning, which tends to justify the misery of few for the wellbeing of many.
If it was produced initially from an animal, there's still harm done, although I'd argue it's infinitely small compared to what it achieves. There's also the fact that many vegan people try not to purchase vegan products if they come from a "non-vegan company". So if a meat producer also starts peddling tofu, vegans will buy from a different brand simply so they don't line the pockets of the meat or dairy industry. With the way things are going, I'd imagine the first to achieve lab-grown top-quality meat would be an agricultural/farm corporation, which wouldn't sit well with many vegans.
Well, I guess that's a hope outside the timescale of individual lives, after hundreds of thousands of years of preventing individuals from florishing.
I understand your point but somehow it sounds like a romantic idea only. Nevertheless, I hope you are right. :)
I think it would be an unstable situation unless the hominid species were somehow incompatible enough to prevent cross-breeding; otherwise, what would happen is what evidently did happen, which is that all of the hominids cross-bred and produced a single remaining phenotype.
Given that modern humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA (and who knows how many other subspecies DNA), I prefer to think we humped them to extinction.
And we don't even stop there. Never minding the flashy war/genocide aspects, we self-select mono cropping to a detrimental degree to our species genetic diversity.
humans self selecting for a lack of genetic diversity (as we do) creates a monocrop of humans with all the susceptibility that entails.
Perhaps a real geneticist will chime in, but I seem to recall we can find more genetic diversity within a family of another species say chimps or dogs than we do across the entire human species. We thought our lack of diversity was due to some "bottleneck" event where the global human population dropped to around 10K. But then we sequenced neanderthal and had to re adjust that to many repeated bottle necks each decreasing the chance of being it being a correct hyposisis as just one bottleneck is unproven.
A different explanation is there were no global bottlenecks just the multitude of day to day local choices we have been making for a long time.
(don't date the people from the other side of the river... they wear funny hats)
From a CS perceptive I would describe it as too much DFS not enough BFS which matters because backtracking means we go extinct.
Humans don't need a species difference to dominate other groups and make them miserable, we're perfectly capable of selecting some other difference to create an "other".
although well-meaning, I believe this is a shallow and Anglo-centric interpretation of history. Slaving was practiced across the world, and is generally regarded as "barbaric" because, well, it is. BUT the "West" did NOT make African Slavery.. Its incomplete to say that, and points fingers at modern people in the USA. I cannot start to give examples without a complete treatment due to the seriously toxic nature of this subject. But since I personally am descended from people in the USA that opposed slavery for the last 300 years AT LEAST, in EVERY FORM, I am sensitive, and strongly opposed, to a "guilt by association" on this topic.
I agree that discussions on this topic are generally toxic, but nothing in the GP directly assigned blame.
It's more or less widely accepted in broader society that European colonialism laid the foundation for much of the modern world and many historians agree it was in turn partially justified by the "subeuropean-ness" of colonized peoples. I can easily show you papers published in the last decade continuing to justify historic colonialism as bringing civilization. There's an excellent (though dated) book on this called "Machines as the Measure of Men", which I often recommend to other people in tech.
What are you talking about, and how does it relate at all to what you are replying to? I didn't even use the word slavery , and I was talking about Rome and cultural attitudes of Europeans and their colonists.
Then you go on about your 300 years of complete family opposition to slavery in the US which has only existed for 244 of those years... and you're speaking for ... eh thousands to tens of thousands of people? Calm down.
And African's did it to other tribes. Who do you think sold the west the slaves in the first place. Tribes in central Africa would be sold through western African countries.
> a collection of alternate history short stories by American writer Harry Turtledove set in a world in which Homo erectus and various megafauna survived in the Americas instead of Native Americans or any other human cultures.
> Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts.
What fascinating hypothesis? Why not spell it out rather being so coy? Well we have different races of people. Why not work off that? It's not like we lack diversity amongst human.
> Then I remember how we treat animals in general
Oh I see now. It gets exhausting and boring to see everything twisted for the vegan agenda. You should see how we treat plants. Now that's horrifying.
> it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable
99.99% of animals killed on earth aren't killed by humans. Each day more animals are killed in nature than are killed by humans in a century. Most animals are made "miserable" by non-humans. I doubt you're losing sleep over that since you can't win virtue signaling points that way.
I'm sorry your chose to pursue this as a personal attack and with such intensity but, nevertheless, and for the sake of those reading this with less animosity, allow me to reply.
It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing.
I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants but allow me to tell you that not only vegans agree on many of the the things that have been said regarding the domination of a species above others.
And yes, even among vegans there are debates about wellbeing/misfortunes of animals cause by other animals.
As many other topics concerning ethics, it's open and, although science has helped much to set a path, much there is still to discuss.
By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share.
The abstract from the paper Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau [1]:
> A late Middle Pleistocene mandible from Baishiya Karst Cave (BKC) on the Tibetan Plateau has been inferred to be from a Denisovan, an Asian hominin related to Neanderthals, on the basis of an amino acid substitution in its collagen. Here we describe the stratigraphy, chronology, and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the sediments in BKC. We recover Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from sediments deposited ~100 thousand and ~60 thousand years ago (ka) and possibly as recently as ~45 ka. The long-term occupation of BKC by Denisovans suggests that they may have adapted to life at high altitudes and may have contributed such adaptations to modern humans on the Tibetan Plateau.
It's interesting that both the Denisovans and the Neanderthals were named after religious individuals. The Denisovan remains were found in the Denisova cave, Denis being a Russian Orthodox hermit who lived there. The word Neanderthal comes from the Neander valley, which was called after a German minister who enjoyed walking the area and writing hymns.
Since I had to look them up, they are very early humans. See quote and link below from wikipedia.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins ( /dɪˈniːsəvə/ di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Denisovans are known from few remains, and, consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. Pending consensus on their taxonomic status, they have been referred to as Homo denisova, H. altaiensis, or H. sapiens denisova.
You can think of them as similar to neanderthals, from what I understand -- a separate species of humans that lived concurrently with modern humans. (Though, denisovans lived in an entirely different region.)
Did those dinosaurs really live near mud flats, or were they driven there by severe drought followed by torrential rains? Or was it part of a migration route driven by repeating cycles of drought and rain? (the fact that they are under many, many layers of sedimentary rock suggests the latter)
Similarly, were hominids living in that cave a plan A, plan B, or plan C? Plan B could be a "Helm's Deep" situation, where you go there when something goes wrong. While Plan C could be an 'any port in a storm' situation where unexpected weather caught you in an area you did not mean to stay.
Plan A might have been a biologically active region where life devours anything that stops moving for too long, the same way we have trouble finding evidence of these huge cultures in Central and South America.