dalongzazhong
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Posts posted by dalongzazhong
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Anyone have some quick ideas about Neanderthals, whether or not they should be incorporated into a future mod, and how, and what their complements would be, e.g. Negroid migrants, other higher hominids, large mammals such as mammoths or saber tooths - ?
Maybe as a mod idea, just to throw around some quick and dirty ideas, we could play on the popular belief that Neanderthals were the "heavy duty" hunters of prehistory, and create units that wore little armor but could survive harsh conditions, were very mobile, and could hurl huge spears that did a great deal of damage.
There's also something to be said about other types of projectiles, and also space for exploring the mystical/spiritual side of Neanderthals as perhaps a civilization specific trait.
Anyway this line of inspiration was brought to you by a new study that confirms every person living outside of africa has neanderthal ancestors. I'm not BS-ing you check it out.
If its true that we all have a trace of neanderthal DNA than we can pretty much safely say there was no mass genocide or some organized conspiracy to kill off our neanderthal competitors. No, we just had some good sex with them.
Since Neanderthals were red-haired and pale-skinned, it makes you wonder about the redheads up in the british isles and scandinavia. When the celts first invaded ireland, were the then occupiers neanderthals or related to them? Also makes you wonder about the roman accounts of the british picts as almost wholly red or blonde haired. Not an accurate description of celts as we know them to be dark haired.
As the science is revealing, neanderthal was not a subspecies but fully human. We mated with them and produced fertile offspring. It is just this phase of neanderthal as the "new negro" that will hopefully come to pass as the anthropological pseudoscience is revealed for its heritage of 18th century anglo-saxon racism.
Anyway much to read on this stuff and I just thought I'd get y'all's reaction on the huge potential of prehistory as not only a mod but also to learn about, as the more we find out about them the more we find out about ourselves.
article from the times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/scie...icle7118573.ece
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abst...ourcetype=HWCIT
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/...enome/#comments
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Sorry for the double posting.
in regard to the idea, I think it is awesome - there is no game that I know of out there that deals with the 10,000 year mark with quality and insight and playability. However, if you have read the book "forbidden archeology" by michael cremo, and any of his other works, you will find the argument for extreme human antiquity hard to resist.
He provides evidence that humans have existed for 2-4 million years, and if his argument is true, not only does it shoot the current theory of evolution to shreds but also encourages the possibility of extraterrestrial seeding of life on this planet. In the vedic scriptures there is said to have been 6 total "annihilations" of life as we know it, and 6 subsequent rebirths. These 6 correspond to the 6 mass extinction events we have in current scientific history: those of the dinosaurs, ice ages and asteroids and stuff. If we accept the possibility of extreme human antiquity then we must also accept the possibility of highly developed civilizations as well, and it not only makes the existence of an "atlantis" plausible but impossible not to have had existed.
is it so hard to believe we have been completely cut off from our ancient ancestors that built civilizations similar to the ones we are so familiar with? Modern science and technology is capped by a fine and definite limit. The remainder of our success in discoveries must be owed to luck and insight. We've been detached from the wisdom of the ancients: the vedas, greeks, mayans, egyptians. We have lost so much ancient texts due to senseless brainwashed destruction.
The only way we can connect to our ancient ancestors is through imagination. Think of the possibilities! The human race may be much more rich and beautiful than we could ever imagine. We are apt to think of the interactions between humans and those beasts scientists have deemed lived millions upon millions of years ago. Think of all the insane challenges our sapien ancestors would have had to deal with in order to pacify the threat of not only other insane animals but other early versions of man. infinitely more fertile ground for plowing than any arbitrary fantasy concoction with wizards, dragons, and the old dreary like.
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The ever-reliable Wikipedia says "a 1993 analysis of 118 hominid crania concluded that the cranial capacity of H.s. neandertal averaged 1412cc while that of fossil modern H.s. sapiens averaged 1487cc". It also says the brain of a sperm whale is on average 8kg, so I'm not sure it's directly correlated with intelligence
Humans didn't even have agriculture until ten thousand years ago, yet now we have digital watches. That's far too short a time period for evolution to have had any significant effect on intelligence - the important factors are knowledge, education, technology, society, infrastructure, etc, not raw intelligence. A modern human living in the wild with no knowledge of civilisation would be as primitive as one living ten thousand years ago, since we're no cleverer than they were back then.
Very insightful point. However, I can't help but think that the toll of such historic events as massive plagues (black death killed some 1/3 population of Europe and Asia?), nomad "scourges" such as those of the chinggis descendancy and timur lenk, and other bottleneck events would have had some play in the "evolution" of modern humans. Certainly I think, as humans became more urbanized they would lose essentials such as a regular intake of meat, and shifted towards a more agriculture-dependent diet. This would have caused malnutrition in many cases, and would have killed off those who could not adapt to the diet. The raw lack of abundancy in increasingly urban settings would have killed off bigger people and allowed smaller people to propogate. Perhaps this is why we see the average height as being laughably small during and before the industrial era, and why the average height as grown as we are being fed better nutrition. However, pre-industrial periods, among people adapted to a regular intake of meat and other proteins, would have been close to and have had metabolic rates similar to people today.
That is my take on the matter. Perhaps also there is some selectivity in plagues: are bigger people more susceptible? They eat more, breath more.. I shan't be silly. But, since plague would spread more rapidly among urban poor, perhaps, in disregard of political correctness, it would have killed off these "dumber" varieties of humans and left the bourgeosie, with more of an inclination to accomodating their health, alive to reproduce.
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that's fine by me. I'm more likely to agree with that than anything else that can be said about this guy. i looked up some of his "drawings" which are sketches that describe abstract mathematics on google books. It's retarded stuff, suffice to say, it made me doubt his credentials as even a legitimate mathematician. yet this stuff keeps on selling, and as only 2 out of 7 volumes have been published so far, they're sure to keep on coming. it has 4 1/2 stars on amazon! what makes people buy into this stuff? I guess my main point is: how DESPERATE are we becoming?
i think that, in these vulnerable times, most people would suck a @#$% for an approved higher source to give them comforting information that rebukes the lies that the quotidian scientists and government have given us. Yet, it is these other sources that are playing us as well, and have no objective to contribute to any real improvement. we are just being handed over to another deception. so the question remains: when will we finally stop relying on the illusion of higher sources of knowledge (and therefore, power) to feed us and start thinking and reasoning (and therefore subsisting) on our own?
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Hey all,
this being the gathering place for all things intellectual, and that most of you are all history buffs, i thought it would be interesting to ask what you think of anatoly fomenko's proposed theory of the fabrication of most history prior to 1000 a.d.
for those of you who don't know who fomenko is, here is a sufficient introduction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)
and a website i'm sure was created by the publisher:
"Learn how and why Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were crafted during Renaissance. What if the Old Testament was a rendition of events of Middle Ages written after the New Testament? Did the crusaders really wait for 1000 years to punish the tormentors of the Messiah? What if Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD?
Sounds unbelievable? Not after you've read "History: Fiction or Science?" by Anatoly Fomenko, leading mathematician of our time. He follows in steps of Sir Isaac Newton and finds clear evidence of falsification of History. Armed with logic, astronomy and computers he proves the history of humankind to be both dramatically different and drastically shorter than generally presumed."
and a rebuttal:
http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizations/id13.html
This guy is no doubt riding a wave of the alternative history craze going on right now, what with Michael Cremo's Forbidden archaeology, and being in the age of anxiety we're in right now, people want answers and are turning over deception after deception on bigger and bigger scales.
here's a youtube video, basically an ad for fomenko's book:
Michael Cremo, whose works are much more credible and popular, is another one who is turning conventional history on its head. I personally enjoy Cremo's ideas more than fomenko's, and cremo has rock-solid (literally) evidence of extreme human antiquity, has hundreds of these pieces of evidence and cases, stuff no one can just ignore. Yet I think fomenko's idea is important too, especially in the fact that he had the intuition, though also the arrogance, to link mathematical and astronomical analysis with his work. Most of us accept that a lot of history that's given to us, whether through the standardized textbook or in real historical documents themselves, is at least partly fabricated or contains elements of legend. Is it so wrong to think that parts of history could be so exaggerated so as to describe a historical reality akin to something fomenko may have delusioned?
by the way, for those of you who know a bit about Michael Cremo, what do you think of him?
Whilst reading through some of the descriptions of fomenko's proposed ideas, it occured to me that, since one of his primary arguments for an illogical chronology was the existence of the dark ages, it he might use the general public's lack of knowledge of the dark ages to his advantage to increase sales. It may be that, what we learn by standard textbooks gives very little about the dark ages and gives the impression that it was an era of total cultural and economic sterility. However, it occured to me that much, much scientifically-backed info might exist on the dark age, and if not for the ineptitude of modern textbooks, then the misinterpretation of the dark ages as a time of total chaos and darkness rather than a period of migration and transition would abound and lead people to question the accepted history when really the fault is of an infectious lazyness.
anyway, you guys are smart guys, who I guess love history as its "historically accurate" form. what do you think of fomenko and his theories, and of alternative history in general? especially in light of every great deception and scheme invented since the twentieth century up till now.
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absolutely. lol
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For Modern day, IRA
Taliban
PKK -
a militant group in northern iran/iraq and turkey that consists of ethnic kurds. They believe in socialism and want to establish a gender-equality reality for their people. Facing genocide and violence from Hussein's Iraq and turkey, the most interesting thing about this group is that women make up 30 percent of the fighting force and they carry out many of the attacks including terrorist attacks and full-on warfare (upon visiting the camps, western reporters reported women fully armed with grenades and ak's).
They also received support from Greece for the purpose of ethnic secession, in the form of arms and training. The U.S. considers the group terrorists, yet we supplied them weapons during the iraq war (hmmm... funny), but Russia has still not joined most of the EU in blacklisting them - also not surprising, given their socialist history.
it would be interesting to see the taliban and the pkk engaged in warfare - as they are both mountainous region fighters - relying on geography and caves to tip the battle in their favor (think vietcong is to jungle guerilla warfare as the pkk and taliban are to mountain guerilla warfare). Also, knowing how much the taliban hate the idea of feminist equality, it would be interesting to see how emotions and beliefs play out in the fight.
kalash ethnic tribe of northern pakistan -
non-violent group of ethnically segregate people living in northern pakistan. They are protected by the pakistan government as they are a minority numbering in the thousands that believes in animism rather than the conventional islam. They are also the subject of religious discrimination - what makes this group "hardcore" in my eyes is that they have managed to stay isolated to such a degree for such a long period of time that there are actually occasional occurences of blond hair/blue eyes within the population due to genetic drift. Another theory is that one of alexandar the great's generals who settled in the region was essentially the ancestor of the group which would explain the blond features of some of the population.
The Sami ethnic group of northern sweden, who created the myth of santa claus by drinking reindeer piss after the reindeer had eaten a poisonous/hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita, inducing them visions of reindeer flying off into the sky.
balinese animists
pygmys of the amazon
The Mongolian/hunnic migrants throughout history - just the thought of traversing across the barren plains of russia and the harsh climate of the steppes - they had to drink their horse's blood and @#$% - they deserve the title of "hardcore."
The aztec human sacrifices - hardcore!
hopi/maya calendarists and astronomers
Wallace clan
Genoese crossbowman - Hardcore in their reputation, skill, and reknown
U.S. navy seals
Polynesian seafarers/navigators - who dared to navigate the pacific using only tides and the stars thousands of years before Europeans discovered America (though props must be given to leif erikkson)
Tuareg nomads of the sahara - any group that has survived, and indeed, thrived in a harsh environment, many of them were nomads, I respect and I hope that you agree as well, deserving of the title hardcore
magyar/hunnic/turkish horsemen of the dark ages - post-dark ages culminating with the prime of the Golden horde - again, nomadic in origin, elite horsemen warriors. I don't know enough about this complex history yet but I would like to read more into the history of the horsemen of the steppe.
Seminole indians of the florida swamps and indeed many of the native americans who defended their way of life to the death
Urumi warriors of india - again don't know much about this group but from AOE3 it seems that they were extremely hardcore
kalaripayattu and the buddhist monks who practiced it in India and who introduced it to the shaolin monks of China. my history may be a little foggy here but from what I know indian monks brought buddhism and martial arts into China, and from kalaripayattu chinese monks derived shaolin kungfu - one of the deadliest and most disciplined martial arts ever, practiced by some of the most hardcore dudes ever.
and that brings me to my second to last group, the chinese boxers of the boxer rebellion - who believed they could dodge bullets and actually charged fully armed british infantry lines with bare fists - and succeeded in their objectives on multiple occasions.
finally,
hungarian girls!
Neanderthals
in Game Modification
Posted · Edited by dalongzazhong
Thanks alandil, a lot of good information there. Few questions though:
I've been a bit confused about what exactly is a subspecies. EDIT: so at what time does a subspecies break off from the species? And can it be said that neanderthals before they became isolated in europe and developed subspecies specific traits, were technically fully homo sapiens? Or did both humans and neanderthals diverge from a common ancestor, that ancestors being neither fully sapien or neanderthal?
When I suggested a mod idea I was just throwing out a crazy idea that might be picked up sometime in the future, when the game has already seen its final release, and would incorporate a total conversion sort of thing. In fact, it might have to be a different game entirely. But until that time the science might reveal a lot more about neanderthals and their hominid contemporaries that would provide the tools to make a semi-accurate and interesting game mod.
And as with the mythology mod, there's a lot of potential in the stuff that we don't know about neanderthals. Developers could let their imaginations fly from what little we know about neanderthal culture.
In regards to the theories about neanderthal gene assimilation, A and B seem to be the simplest and thus the most likely. I suppose either would explain how "every" non-african possesses neanderthal genes. Some of the scientists have said only "some" non-africans will possess the gene whereas others say "all." So how are we going to test this to determine whether every non african has the gene?
But what's also mind-boggling is that neanderthals were living in Europe for 100,000 years before humans entered the picture. Assuming that our african migrants possessed "black african" traits, then how is the span of time that they were in europe enough for them to evolve the physical traits that are characteristic of modern europeans? Unless, they had assimilated some neanderthal traits who were already well adapted to that environment.
I'm no scientist, but again, taking into consideration some basic assumptions about the characteristics of our "out of africa" ancestors, the conjecture that humans could have not mated frequently with neanderthals just doesn't seem to add up.
But there is also a huge lack of evidence here. As more begins to turn up we'll get to see just what kind of technology they used, and from their art, figure out what they believed in. While I don't know if they had any religion, they were definitely spiritual, because they made graves for their dead and prepared grave goods for them in the afterlife. As soon as Paabo completes the genome sequence we'll finally have the first clear picture of how close or far humans were in relation to them.
But where did the beaker folk IIRC come from, and how long and since when does the record indicate they stayed there? And what sorts of physical and cultural traits did they possess, reflected in the region of Europe they presumably originated from? But isn't it possible that pre-celts had already accommodated some neanderthal genes from a hundred thousand years ago, that they were not "pure human"?