> Nonetheless, he said, his research offers evidence that Native Americans were doing complex counting and were likely to have been the first humans to contemplate concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time.
That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
> the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers
Or maybe intellectual refers to someone a position in a society that sufficiently is well-off to be able to support some guy not having to provide work for collective survival and who can spend time trying to formalize abstract thinking for which writing would help with (which north americans natives did not have)
It's ok, it can be an interesting culture worthy of being studied, and of course they weren't dummies, without trying to pretend that north american natives were "contemplating concepts like the law of large numbers" without writing device or support nor some kind of alphabet, come on
Yes colonization is awful and yes the natives were genocided but that doesn't mean that everyone was on its way too landing on the moon had they not been suppressed both physically and culturally. The path to civilization only gets narrower and the people who get to contribute meaningfully fewer and fewer.
don't worry, professional researchers studying this stuff for real, a helpful hn commenter is on the way!
Nobody is perfect, even "professionals" and I think there's a reasonable difference between "I, a novice, am skeptical of your conclusions" and "I, a novice, have come up with an entirely new theory".
[deleted]
People used to play board games to gamble/predict, for sure; but they also liked a moneyless/careless play.
If his evidence of complex counting is convincing, then it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies.
That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely unknown".
Before you toss the coin, God has determined with full certainty on which side it will land based on everything riding on that coin toss and all the third-order consequences, in His infinite wisdom. It cannot land on any side other than the preordained. The way you find God's will is to flip the coin.
To the pre-statistical brain it was unthinkable (and probably blasphemeous) to perform any sort of expected value calculation on this.
We know today that the frequency is useful for making decisions around the individual throws. Back then, that connection just wasn't there. Each throw was considered its own unique event.
(We can still see this in e.g. statistically illiterate fans of football. Penalty kicks are a relatively stable random process -- basically a weighted coin toss. Yet you'll see fans claim each penalty kick is a unique event completely disconnected from the long-run frequency.)
Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know, it didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until the 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe in the 1600s...)
----
Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from Weisberg's Willful Ignorance as well as A World of Chance by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors' research is based mostly on European written sources, meaning the emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this.
It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. It's possible even fully-fledged statistical reasoning existed, although it seems unlikely because it is the sort of thing that relies heavily on written records, and those would come up in research. But it's possible! That's what I meant by the last parenthetical – maybe Europeans didn't invent it at all, but were merely inspired by existing American practice.
Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has the option of getting very abstract.
It's pretty common, for example, to believe that God is on our side and we will win the war or somesuch. Actually walking onto a battlefield with a literal expectation of divine intervention... much less as common. Pious generals still believe in tactics, steel and suchlike. Not always... but usually.
European pre-modern writers were mostly very pious. The works preserved are likewise very pious. Greek philosophers were often closer to atheists than later Christians.
That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.
Yes, but so too is a modern western framing of these “dice” as “gambling” objects.
And also, the esteem in recognizing them as prefiguring a skill or system of thought that fund managers and FDA panels use today. In a roundabout way, it praises our own society’s systems by recognizing an ancient civilization for potentially having discovered some of their mathematical preliminaries.
yeah man these boys were definitely doing bayesian probability and gaussian distributions to operate their sea shell based barter economy
Fatalism is widespread, but not nearly universal enough that we can say it was the norm 15000 years ago.
For that matter, people who were pretty fatalist were still capable of using chance for purposes of fairness. The democrats in ancient Athens come to mind. I'm also pretty sure the (Christian) apostles' use of chance was also more about avoiding a human making the decision, than about divination.
Are you quite sure of that? Historians would beg to differ.
I'm not saying divination isn't a thing, I'm saying there are examples of use of chance where it doesn't seem like divination.
Athenians selected through sortition didn't seem to act much like they believed they were chosen by the gods, and they defended their institutions mainly as wisdom, not as revelation.
And the apostles, being Jews, had a big taboo about using chance to determine God's will, but apparently not against using chance to fill vacancies.
That's actually the opposite of the historical evidence.
There are bible passages suggesting the outcome of lots is God's will, and there are passages condemning divination. You can find them from the same links you posted above. But at the time of the apostles, it was a no-no to use chance to figure out God's will.
Please don't just shake links out of your sleeve, and talk to me instead. Do you think the Athenians acted like they were chosen by the gods when their number came up?
Don't you see a difference between the situations where chance could clearly have been used simply as a mechanism for fairness / avoiding a biased choice, and things like reading the movement of the birds or interpreting the shape of molten lead thrown into water?
Even in things like the goat choice in the bible you link above, I think it may be more about fairness than divination. Because as far as I know, the priests actually got to eat the sacrificial goat, but not the scapegoat they chased into the wild. So was it really about divining which goat God hated more, or was it maybe about "don't cheat by keeping the juicy goat for yourselves and chasing away the mangy one!"?
Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
From TFA:
> No prehistoric dice have ever been discovered in the eastern part of North America.
Come on, you don’t really think modern statistics might’ve come about from Europeans taking inspiration in the gambling practices of nomadic peoples in remote southwestern parts of North America. No need to pay lip service to every scold.
I don't, when the much more likely answer is that it came from the more than a millenia old gambling practices of Europe.
That has barely to do with my specific point. The researcher in TFA said if they were doing complex counting then blah blah blah.
The general insight is that complex counting would force some kind of Bayesian or probabilistic reasoning even one that is informal, intuitive, rudimentary or partly incorrect. Whereas a theory of divining stones usage would have very little actual complex counting involved, maybe they had the tribal equivalent of fortune slips, and so they would not be cognitively challenged to reason about dice. What constitutes complex counting, I don't know, ask the researcher. But IMO it's not out realm of impossibility and time and again we have discovered the old ones of Homo sapiens were more cognitively/intellectually sophisticated than these kinds of scientists assumed earlier. I'm not wedded to this, it would be hard to prove, especially as a hypothesis involving human cognitive constraints/evolution, but I won't dismiss it as completely implausible either. It is an interesting if-then "archaeological cognitive science" argument, that's all.
> it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies
We can actually tell from their dice that they don’t.
I believe in the book Against the Gods the author described ancient dice being—mostly—uneven. (One exception, I believe, was ancient Egypt.) The thinking was a weird-looking dice looks the most intuitively random. It wasn’t until later, when the average gambler started statistically reasoning, that standardized dice became common.
These dice are highly non-standard. In their own way, their similarity to other cultures of antiquities’ senses of randomness is kind of beautiful.
It's not entirely crazy. I believe Thorp described this about roulette wheels. If they had no imperfection at all, it would be computationally laborious but not unthinkable to compute the result from the initial positions and velocities. In order to be unpredictable, roulette wheels need to have imperfections. Those very same imperfections, of course, lead to some statistical regularities.
Anecdotally I was on a streak and the dealer was actively concentrating and focusing to get my number again. She managed to get it 4 out of 5 spins. Now she would obviously never admit to this, but I'm positive that she was able to, on this specific wheel, land on the number she wanted.
I think we would've kept going but she rotated off and I cashed out.
Edit: Thorp and Shannon! What a duo. Great articles, thanks for sharing.
If you are the house you probably want to go around every so often and give the wheel a little bump to reset the entropy seed for the day.
Maybe this is because dice were originally made from the bones of animals like sheep, which are inherently irregular.
I was going to ask how we know if the dice are intentionally uneven, as opposed to it being a result of technological, cost, or time constraints.
I don't see the point of being confident about this in either direction. I will not assert for certain but (or, IF) they had dice for 12000 years (12,000!) and to be so certain they didn't know anything at all on an intuitive level is a bit strong a position to take, I don't see that as a safe null/default hypothesis.
I had also said "..., THEN it's not implausible" so I don't love how you quoted a strawman in the first place.
It doesn't matter. The first point raised was essentially"well the dice were just part of a belief system about divinity so they could not have been more sophisticated than that" and then I said that the article's logical reasoning is actually more interesting than that kind of kneejerk dismissal. Just that one line of thought mentioned in the article is intrinsically interesting, because it posits a kind of forcing argument, that if there is evidence for complexity behavior then there is evidence for complex thought required of it. That is an interesting cognitive science kind of argument, different than a flat argument of the type "oh their belief system would have prevented them from developing it".
Very interesting. The earliest example of the familiar cube shaped dice I know if is from Indus valley civilisation from around 2600 BC, closely followed by Mesopotamian dice.
This discovery pushes the history of dice from 5K years to 12K years.
These aren't quite as symmetric. I guess humans had to wait longer to discover some of the platonic solids.
This golden icosahedron of orders of magnitude more recent vintage is quite a beauty
Can we call it a D2? I'd call it a non-monetary-gaming-fair-coin, but it's hard to reduce it to a 4 letter word like "coin" or "dice" that most people would understand.
Yes, but I'd prefer some more specificity to the shape. D2 can be coin shaped, but don't have to be. There are some diverse shapes in the image of the article.
Chip
IIUC "chip" is just a token that represent money, they are not necessary "fair", they are not good to be tossed.
I imagine a parallel world where chips are shaped like empty cones, so they can pilled but they are very bad as a D2. (Perhaps a world where chips are shaped like cubes is more realistic, also bad as D2.)
That's gonna trigger some gambling addicts.
This is NBC re-hashing a Wall Street Jornal story from a week ago:
So, what is the right way to call such civilizations, according to you?
Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.
[flagged]
> “It’s an incredibly exciting finding, because for so long, the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers,” Wiener said.
Really? That's what this is motivated by? Plain old boring science and more objective documentation of artifacts aren't good enough reasons?
How is anything being suppressed if there are a ton of random stories constantly being published about Native Americans apparently being secret geniuses with magical powers?
This is borderline racist. NBC has really gone down the shitter.
> Madden left legal practice in 2017 and started independent research on the Olmec civilization, an early Mesoamerican population, before he began a master’s program in archaeology — his “original love” — in 2022.
At least they're honest about who they're interviewing and leave it up to the reader to decide credibility?
This is becoming more and more common. I recently read an article about the male genetic material's influence on pregnancy complications and it included a similar blurb about women's rights and colonialism (don't ask me how that last one is related). Like, just state the findings and your conclusions from them. No need to attempt to save the world.
>it included a similar blurb about women's rights and colonialism
Obligatory mantras, like Muslims repeating the takbir.
Im not American, so my knowledge on the natives, or Indians as I'm told they prefer to call themselves, was based on media made by these colonial powers. I started reading into the subject recently and I find that the only thing the colonial powers seem to miss out is the brutal treatment of women, the gang rapes and the torture. Interestingly enough, the powers that be in New York that never had dealings with the Indians face to face had the same picture of peace loving land hippies in mind when telling southerners how to negotiate with them.
The comanche specifically were some of the most impressive and frightening people I've ever read about.
That's quite amusing; you don't see the connection between "magical powers" and sidelining real intellectual achievements?
Also, Madden is not a master's student anymore. He's a 62 year old doctoral candidate and the lead author on this study.
I do see the connection. That was my point. We went from overt racism (by the oppressors alleged by NBC) to covert racism (by NBC themselves). We could have done without the virtue signaling.
I also say "alleged" because in most cases those oppressors are the other half of the family tree for the people we have alive today we're calling some particular outgroup. News organizations like NBC used to treat these topics with more care to avoid "othering" and full awareness that modern subjects are a mixed people with a ton of nuance. This is the USA, for crying out loud.
Now if you really want your "woosh", let's consider the stereotype of native americans owning casinos, and this article is about their ancient dice. :-)
> this is borderline racist
.. towards who? Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news?
I'm offended anytime any group is in the news and the report goes from facts to speculation on what that must mean that is obviously rooted in some modern stereotype. Natives commonly get this treatment, but there are plenty of other groups it happens to as well.
>Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news?
Why do you intentionally try not to understand the point someone makes and then come up with your own negative fantasy about them?
> Nonetheless, he said, his research offers evidence that Native Americans were doing complex counting and were likely to have been the first humans to contemplate concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time.
That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
> the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers
Or maybe intellectual refers to someone a position in a society that sufficiently is well-off to be able to support some guy not having to provide work for collective survival and who can spend time trying to formalize abstract thinking for which writing would help with (which north americans natives did not have)
It's ok, it can be an interesting culture worthy of being studied, and of course they weren't dummies, without trying to pretend that north american natives were "contemplating concepts like the law of large numbers" without writing device or support nor some kind of alphabet, come on
Yes colonization is awful and yes the natives were genocided but that doesn't mean that everyone was on its way too landing on the moon had they not been suppressed both physically and culturally. The path to civilization only gets narrower and the people who get to contribute meaningfully fewer and fewer.
don't worry, professional researchers studying this stuff for real, a helpful hn commenter is on the way!
Nobody is perfect, even "professionals" and I think there's a reasonable difference between "I, a novice, am skeptical of your conclusions" and "I, a novice, have come up with an entirely new theory".
People used to play board games to gamble/predict, for sure; but they also liked a moneyless/careless play.
If his evidence of complex counting is convincing, then it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies.
That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely unknown".
Before you toss the coin, God has determined with full certainty on which side it will land based on everything riding on that coin toss and all the third-order consequences, in His infinite wisdom. It cannot land on any side other than the preordained. The way you find God's will is to flip the coin.
To the pre-statistical brain it was unthinkable (and probably blasphemeous) to perform any sort of expected value calculation on this.
We know today that the frequency is useful for making decisions around the individual throws. Back then, that connection just wasn't there. Each throw was considered its own unique event.
(We can still see this in e.g. statistically illiterate fans of football. Penalty kicks are a relatively stable random process -- basically a weighted coin toss. Yet you'll see fans claim each penalty kick is a unique event completely disconnected from the long-run frequency.)
Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know, it didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until the 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe in the 1600s...)
----
Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from Weisberg's Willful Ignorance as well as A World of Chance by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors' research is based mostly on European written sources, meaning the emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this.
It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. It's possible even fully-fledged statistical reasoning existed, although it seems unlikely because it is the sort of thing that relies heavily on written records, and those would come up in research. But it's possible! That's what I meant by the last parenthetical – maybe Europeans didn't invent it at all, but were merely inspired by existing American practice.
Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has the option of getting very abstract.
It's pretty common, for example, to believe that God is on our side and we will win the war or somesuch. Actually walking onto a battlefield with a literal expectation of divine intervention... much less as common. Pious generals still believe in tactics, steel and suchlike. Not always... but usually.
European pre-modern writers were mostly very pious. The works preserved are likewise very pious. Greek philosophers were often closer to atheists than later Christians.
That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.
Yes, but so too is a modern western framing of these “dice” as “gambling” objects.
And also, the esteem in recognizing them as prefiguring a skill or system of thought that fund managers and FDA panels use today. In a roundabout way, it praises our own society’s systems by recognizing an ancient civilization for potentially having discovered some of their mathematical preliminaries.
yeah man these boys were definitely doing bayesian probability and gaussian distributions to operate their sea shell based barter economy
Fatalism is widespread, but not nearly universal enough that we can say it was the norm 15000 years ago.
For that matter, people who were pretty fatalist were still capable of using chance for purposes of fairness. The democrats in ancient Athens come to mind. I'm also pretty sure the (Christian) apostles' use of chance was also more about avoiding a human making the decision, than about divination.
Are you quite sure of that? Historians would beg to differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche
I'm not saying divination isn't a thing, I'm saying there are examples of use of chance where it doesn't seem like divination.
Athenians selected through sortition didn't seem to act much like they believed they were chosen by the gods, and they defended their institutions mainly as wisdom, not as revelation.
And the apostles, being Jews, had a big taboo about using chance to determine God's will, but apparently not against using chance to fill vacancies.
That's actually the opposite of the historical evidence.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%...
There are bible passages suggesting the outcome of lots is God's will, and there are passages condemning divination. You can find them from the same links you posted above. But at the time of the apostles, it was a no-no to use chance to figure out God's will.
Please don't just shake links out of your sleeve, and talk to me instead. Do you think the Athenians acted like they were chosen by the gods when their number came up?
Don't you see a difference between the situations where chance could clearly have been used simply as a mechanism for fairness / avoiding a biased choice, and things like reading the movement of the birds or interpreting the shape of molten lead thrown into water?
Even in things like the goat choice in the bible you link above, I think it may be more about fairness than divination. Because as far as I know, the priests actually got to eat the sacrificial goat, but not the scapegoat they chased into the wild. So was it really about divining which goat God hated more, or was it maybe about "don't cheat by keeping the juicy goat for yourselves and chasing away the mangy one!"?
Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
From TFA:
> No prehistoric dice have ever been discovered in the eastern part of North America.
Come on, you don’t really think modern statistics might’ve come about from Europeans taking inspiration in the gambling practices of nomadic peoples in remote southwestern parts of North America. No need to pay lip service to every scold.
I don't, when the much more likely answer is that it came from the more than a millenia old gambling practices of Europe.
That has barely to do with my specific point. The researcher in TFA said if they were doing complex counting then blah blah blah.
The general insight is that complex counting would force some kind of Bayesian or probabilistic reasoning even one that is informal, intuitive, rudimentary or partly incorrect. Whereas a theory of divining stones usage would have very little actual complex counting involved, maybe they had the tribal equivalent of fortune slips, and so they would not be cognitively challenged to reason about dice. What constitutes complex counting, I don't know, ask the researcher. But IMO it's not out realm of impossibility and time and again we have discovered the old ones of Homo sapiens were more cognitively/intellectually sophisticated than these kinds of scientists assumed earlier. I'm not wedded to this, it would be hard to prove, especially as a hypothesis involving human cognitive constraints/evolution, but I won't dismiss it as completely implausible either. It is an interesting if-then "archaeological cognitive science" argument, that's all.
> it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies
We can actually tell from their dice that they don’t.
I believe in the book Against the Gods the author described ancient dice being—mostly—uneven. (One exception, I believe, was ancient Egypt.) The thinking was a weird-looking dice looks the most intuitively random. It wasn’t until later, when the average gambler started statistically reasoning, that standardized dice became common.
These dice are highly non-standard. In their own way, their similarity to other cultures of antiquities’ senses of randomness is kind of beautiful.
It's not entirely crazy. I believe Thorp described this about roulette wheels. If they had no imperfection at all, it would be computationally laborious but not unthinkable to compute the result from the initial positions and velocities. In order to be unpredictable, roulette wheels need to have imperfections. Those very same imperfections, of course, lead to some statistical regularities.
Edit: It wasn't quite that, but very nearly: start reading paragraph 5 in http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
In the next article in the series, he explains that in practice, roulette wheels are often tilted and that can be used to gain a further advantage: http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
Anecdotally I was on a streak and the dealer was actively concentrating and focusing to get my number again. She managed to get it 4 out of 5 spins. Now she would obviously never admit to this, but I'm positive that she was able to, on this specific wheel, land on the number she wanted.
I think we would've kept going but she rotated off and I cashed out.
Edit: Thorp and Shannon! What a duo. Great articles, thanks for sharing.
If you are the house you probably want to go around every so often and give the wheel a little bump to reset the entropy seed for the day.
Maybe this is because dice were originally made from the bones of animals like sheep, which are inherently irregular.
I was going to ask how we know if the dice are intentionally uneven, as opposed to it being a result of technological, cost, or time constraints.
I don't see the point of being confident about this in either direction. I will not assert for certain but (or, IF) they had dice for 12000 years (12,000!) and to be so certain they didn't know anything at all on an intuitive level is a bit strong a position to take, I don't see that as a safe null/default hypothesis.
I had also said "..., THEN it's not implausible" so I don't love how you quoted a strawman in the first place.
...and, is it?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
It doesn't matter. The first point raised was essentially"well the dice were just part of a belief system about divinity so they could not have been more sophisticated than that" and then I said that the article's logical reasoning is actually more interesting than that kind of kneejerk dismissal. Just that one line of thought mentioned in the article is intrinsically interesting, because it posits a kind of forcing argument, that if there is evidence for complexity behavior then there is evidence for complex thought required of it. That is an interesting cognitive science kind of argument, different than a flat argument of the type "oh their belief system would have prevented them from developing it".
Very interesting. The earliest example of the familiar cube shaped dice I know if is from Indus valley civilisation from around 2600 BC, closely followed by Mesopotamian dice.
This discovery pushes the history of dice from 5K years to 12K years.
These aren't quite as symmetric. I guess humans had to wait longer to discover some of the platonic solids.
This golden icosahedron of orders of magnitude more recent vintage is quite a beauty
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333949003_A_Numbere...
> The dice are almost always two-sided
Don't train your AI on that
Can we call it a D2? I'd call it a non-monetary-gaming-fair-coin, but it's hard to reduce it to a 4 letter word like "coin" or "dice" that most people would understand.
Yes, but I'd prefer some more specificity to the shape. D2 can be coin shaped, but don't have to be. There are some diverse shapes in the image of the article.
Chip
IIUC "chip" is just a token that represent money, they are not necessary "fair", they are not good to be tossed.
I imagine a parallel world where chips are shaped like empty cones, so they can pilled but they are very bad as a D2. (Perhaps a world where chips are shaped like cubes is more realistic, also bad as D2.)
That's gonna trigger some gambling addicts.
This is NBC re-hashing a Wall Street Jornal story from a week ago:
https://www.wsj.com/science/dice-research-humans-gambling-e6...
I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something similar enough.
https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
[dead]
[flagged]
So, what is the right way to call such civilizations, according to you?
Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.
[flagged]
> “It’s an incredibly exciting finding, because for so long, the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers,” Wiener said.
Really? That's what this is motivated by? Plain old boring science and more objective documentation of artifacts aren't good enough reasons?
How is anything being suppressed if there are a ton of random stories constantly being published about Native Americans apparently being secret geniuses with magical powers?
This is borderline racist. NBC has really gone down the shitter.
> Madden left legal practice in 2017 and started independent research on the Olmec civilization, an early Mesoamerican population, before he began a master’s program in archaeology — his “original love” — in 2022.
At least they're honest about who they're interviewing and leave it up to the reader to decide credibility?
This is becoming more and more common. I recently read an article about the male genetic material's influence on pregnancy complications and it included a similar blurb about women's rights and colonialism (don't ask me how that last one is related). Like, just state the findings and your conclusions from them. No need to attempt to save the world.
>it included a similar blurb about women's rights and colonialism
Obligatory mantras, like Muslims repeating the takbir.
Im not American, so my knowledge on the natives, or Indians as I'm told they prefer to call themselves, was based on media made by these colonial powers. I started reading into the subject recently and I find that the only thing the colonial powers seem to miss out is the brutal treatment of women, the gang rapes and the torture. Interestingly enough, the powers that be in New York that never had dealings with the Indians face to face had the same picture of peace loving land hippies in mind when telling southerners how to negotiate with them. The comanche specifically were some of the most impressive and frightening people I've ever read about.
That's quite amusing; you don't see the connection between "magical powers" and sidelining real intellectual achievements?
Also, Madden is not a master's student anymore. He's a 62 year old doctoral candidate and the lead author on this study.
I do see the connection. That was my point. We went from overt racism (by the oppressors alleged by NBC) to covert racism (by NBC themselves). We could have done without the virtue signaling.
I also say "alleged" because in most cases those oppressors are the other half of the family tree for the people we have alive today we're calling some particular outgroup. News organizations like NBC used to treat these topics with more care to avoid "othering" and full awareness that modern subjects are a mixed people with a ton of nuance. This is the USA, for crying out loud.
Now if you really want your "woosh", let's consider the stereotype of native americans owning casinos, and this article is about their ancient dice. :-)
> this is borderline racist
.. towards who? Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news?
I'm offended anytime any group is in the news and the report goes from facts to speculation on what that must mean that is obviously rooted in some modern stereotype. Natives commonly get this treatment, but there are plenty of other groups it happens to as well.
>Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news?
Why do you intentionally try not to understand the point someone makes and then come up with your own negative fantasy about them?