Never trust a monster - Page 3

 Vito wrote:


Or maybe they were Southeast Asians:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0903_030903_bajaskull.html

The part I would doubt about the original claim would be the
"all killed off" bit.  I can't think of an example where *all* of the
inhabitants or a given region were killed off by a later-arriving
group; more typically, you'd expect to see a goodly number
enslaved or otherwise assimilated by the new culture, and with
the long-term result coming from intermarriage of the two -
descendants who had significant contributions from both
populations.

Bob M.

 
The Carib indians come to mind. Apparantly there's
still a population of ~3,000 surviving, but their near
extinction was one of the more important reasons for
importation of African slaves to the islands of the new
world.

Besides deliberate extermination, there's also disease.
Most likely, that was also responsible for the extinction of
Flores Man

European (Soloutrian ??) inhabitants in the new world
is pretty speculative, though some form of pre-clovis
settlement seems very likely.

 
Neanderthal, meet Cro-Magnon...

Hello?? Neanderthal?? ...............

 
New article on that in the August Scientific American
that I want to reread more carefully. The author
suggests maybe 15,000 years of coexistence prior
to the disappearance of the Neanderthals.

Gives some pause for thought when you realize how
much of the history of modern humans is still a total
mystery to us. Recorded human history is really a very
small peehole in the snow.

 Rob Kleinschmidt wrote:

Right.  And we still don't know why or how the
Neanderthals vanished, really.  It might have been
because the Cro-Magnons killed them off; it might
have been something else entirely (a disease to which
the Neanderthals had no resistance, but the C-Ms
did?).  We'll never really know for sure.  My earlier
comments, of course, had to do only with what we
jokingly refer to as "recorded" history, where we might
have at least some idea of what happened between the
two peoples.

Bob M.