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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.

The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.

Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"

So what's behind this?

Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.

As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.

This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.

When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.

Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.

So...what’s supposed to be the problem with AApoc? White supremacy is pretty nonspecific. Is Hitler involved, or is that just a segue?

Also, wiki tells me Bell Beakers were “contemporary with and preceded by” Corded Ware-iors. I didn’t see any claims that it was peaceful, and the “renewed emphasis on migration” section is headed with a bow. A nice touch.

I’d be interested in reading more on the drama of this field, if you have any articles.

This article is a good historiography of thought in archeology and how DNA studies are overturning the post 1960s paradigm in remarkable ways:

“Along with these two papers came several more (Mathieson et al 2015 and Poznik et al 2015) which asserted that the Yamnaya invaders were fair skinned, much larger in stature and were predominantly male.

It is difficult to overstate the distress and anxiety these results caused in the archaeological world - a theoretical bomb had just removed the foundations from underneath the entirety of modern scholarship.”

https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/broken-open

In the same vein as my prior post on Zorro and being shocked that people I hate haven't tried [thing]; I've personally always been astounded that Neanderthal DNA isn't considered the foundational concept for HBDers and Hoteps respectively. It's actually a very neat way of slicing what a lot of HBDers want: 1-2% varied Neanderthal DNA in Asians and Europeans, 0% in sub-saharan Africans.

For modern HBDers, this is the motherlode, a neat way to slice Black people off as inherently different from both whites and Asians. Center the whole idea of civilization on the Neanderthal, whether that is the "higher human instincts" or the whole Atlantic/Lemuria complex of lost civilization ideas. There's the "science" saying exactly what they want it to!

For Hoteps, it's an even better find: white people are literally less pure humans than Black people. My distant European ancestors literally interbred with a dying outmoded pre-human hominid species, and my Nigerian friend can quite frankly state that his did not, that he's a pure human! Yakub vindicated! The white man's own science has found that the white man isn't a real human, but a hybrid chimera!

I've considered writing two giant effortposts on it, from separate accounts, one from each side, just to gage the relative reactions.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the popular marketing of Neanderthals as primitive grunting cavemen has been so successful for so long that it is unrecoverable intellectual property. Neanderthal just has no glitz to it, nothing people want to identify with.

White identitarianism has always relied on obscure historical theories, Aryan was the academic term used for the Proto-Indo-Europeans before Hitler made Aryan too icky*, and PIE was coined primarily as a euphemism to refer to what (until then) was the much catchier Aryan theory.** Before Hitler, Aryanism relied on all kinds of skull measuring and migration theories, from the pseudo-mystical Atlantis to the politically convenient "Maori and Japanese are lost Aryans, Australian Aboriginals and Chinese are not" to the academic study of word origins and linguistic analysis. What's been missing from this soup for a while is a useable marketing terminology. Enter Yamnaya! Yamnaya is catchy enough, and enough of a blank slate, that maybe it will catch on.

*Interestingly outside of Western Europe/America this taboo doesn't really hold. One of my favorite things I've seen over and over is like five Iranian friends have tried to explain at a party to a group of horrified SWPL white people how Persians are the "original Aryans"; understanding not at all why everyone is looking at them like that.

**As an aside, if we're going to do anti-Nazi education, rather than presenting Nazi archeology and history as "boo outgroup" wow look at what those wacky morons believed; we should start by presenting (smart) kids with the actual PIE/Aryan story, with the linguistic and mythological evidence, and present Aryanism as what it was: mythmaking, no different from the way we present the idea that the Lenape or the Greeks heard thunder and got scared and said "There must be a god of Thunder and he is angry!" 19th century Germans were presented with a confusing landscape, a world in which they were discovering these deep linguistic and cultural similarities across continents, and in which Europeans were absurdly dominant over the rest of the world, and in trying to explain it to the best of their abilities they produced myths, no better and no worse than those just-so stories of Ovid. This will help students to actually understand why Nazis believed what they did, and help to educate them to spot real life parallels to the Nazis, which is impossible if you just think Nazi=evil.

Of course, this will never happen, an even mildly sympathetic portrayal of Nazi ideas in education is considered "too dangerous." They fear it might seduce the children if they are exposed and asked to entertain the idea for even a second. I wonder why?

For Hoteps, it's an even better find: white people are literally less pure humans than Black people. My distant European ancestors literally interbred with a dying outmoded pre-human hominid species, and my Nigerian friend can quite frankly state that his did not, that he's a pure human! Yakub vindicated! The white man's own science has found that the white man isn't a real human, but a hybrid chimera!

Not actually correct though since Africans have between 9 and 19% DNA admixture from a ghost hominid population.

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aax5097

For modern HBDers, this is the motherlode, a neat way to slice Black people off as inherently different from both whites and Asians. Center the whole idea of civilization on the Neanderthal, whether that is the "higher human instincts" or the whole Atlantic/Lemuria complex of lost civilization ideas. There's the "science" saying exactly what they want it to!

Perhaps your model of the HBD supporter is just wrong? We've said plenty of times here that we are not motivated by the desire to dehumanize populations that seem to perform worse on average. You'd think many of us not belonging to the top performing groups would have been the more obvious reasons to trust us in this but here you have discovered yet another way that our motivations are better in line with what we say they are than your uncharitable assumption and it seems more confusing than enlightening to you. What would it take to prove to you that we are not motivated by racial hatred?

Hoteps don’t read genetics studies and the discovery of Denisovan DNA in East Asians and Australo-Melanesians as well as relatively high percentages of archaic ghost DNA that diverged even prior to the split between humans and Neanderthals within African populations muddies the waters significantly.

I think it’s a subculture thing.

Writing/sharing articles about the pet topic signals membership and triggers those nice tribal feelings. Niche topics are even better because half the fun of Internet communities is diversity specialization of interests. Stone Age Pervert gets to be “that guy who knows what’s up with the Yamnaya.”

See also the dynamics around Internet antisemitism.

I hang out on /r/MawInstallation and occasionally answer questions or argue. I also take opportunities to shill for my pet theory. It’s not that expect to make “Star Wars planets are actually really small” mainstream; it’s just fun, and I wouldn’t mind being known as the Small Wars guy.

My guess is that it may be viewed as a general thrust against multiculturalism and the idea of peaceful coexistence and co-development of different cultures, religions and ethnicities voluntarily living next to each other and enriching one another.

The thing is that many of these stories over the centuries began as cooperation first: often the outside peoples were used by indigenous population in certain manner be it trade or even mercenaries. Once the other culture learned about the domestic population and its riches and strong/weak points, the invasion commenced. Think of stories like apocryphal story of Germanic people invited to England in order to fight Picts or Turkic Mamluks in Egypt or even in 19th/20th century story of Jews in Palestine. Not exactly poster cases for more immigration and multiculturalism.

The Globular Amphora people were even more fair skinned than the Yamnaya. The Bell Beakers we’re more fair skinned than the Corded Ware culture people despite their higher Early European Farmer ancestry.

From what I gather the issue is that the show notes that a lot of cultures have stories about wise men from the sea coming and bringing them things like agricultures and laws. eg Quetzalcoatl, Osiris. Graham theorizes that these may be memories of real events.

They are calling the implication that these societies didn't learn these things on their own racist.

The "white supremacist" charge seems like a real stretch because there's not even a hint that anyone involved was white.

I'm heard about the bias towards pacifism in "Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade. It's a great book, but it came out in 2007 so it might be dated about the state of the field. Also his 2014 book "A Troublesome Inheritance".

Articles like this made me think there's still some of it around: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/iberia-prehistory-dna.html

But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.

DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.

To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.

“I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.

Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.

Oh and I got the names mixed up. The claim I read was that "Battle-Axe Culture" name used to be more common than "Corded Ware culture". Looks like it's still used in some cases.

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And further, "we see a lot of dead people buried together" doesn't strike me as a sign of egalitarianism, but rather of this. And mass graves are not signs of peace and egalitarianism, but lots of people dying at once, often due to violence.

"Buried together" is insufficiently defined to be properly analyzed by any of us. Certainly, it could mean a mass grave. Alternatively, it could mean something like this. I think you'll agree both have vastly different connotations.

And further, "we see a lot of dead people buried together" doesn't strike me as a sign of egalitarianism, but rather of this. And mass graves are not signs of peace and egalitarianism, but lots of people dying at once, often due to violence.

Presumably it can be determined how the people buried there died, i.e., whether it was violence or natural causes, and if they were buried simultaneously or over a longer period of time.

That "it is a mystery" line has to be subtle mockery from the NYT, surely, right? It's positioned and worded so perfectly...

Or this like the reactionary version of stoned people thinking everyone on TV is high? Do I just want to believe that everyone's walking around laughing at this stuff and only pretending to take it seriously so they don't get purged?

See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrationism_and_diffusionism

Not to put too fine a point on it, but an entire generation of anthropology was communist fanfiction with no grounding in reality, and this stuff still informs the prejudices of our educated class today.

But... it was peer reviewed! How could this be!?

Avoid low-effort sarcasm, please.

Duly noted.

From Boingboing:

If you research Graham Hancock and look at his books over time, as I have, one of the things that you discover about him is that he self-edits. He doesn't use the word Atlantis now except very sparingly. He has also edited himself since 1995, when, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he came out and said that it was an ancient white civilization. He no longer says the "white" part in the series. If you pay careful attention, he does talk about "heavily bearded Quetzalcoatl" who arrives, according to myth, to give the gift of knowledge, but he doesn't mention the other part of that trope, which all of us know about, which is that this visitor supposedly had white skin.

It's similar to the way that Donald Trump operates. He will get to the edge of something, but he won't say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, "I didn't say that," and he didn't say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?

File under "demand for white supremacy continues to exceed supply".

So...what’s supposed to be the problem with AApoc?

Giving credence to a conspiracy-theory-oriented worldview and "alternative facts", I would imagine.

The wokes don’t seem overly preoccupied with alternative facts that are irrelevant, unlike previous versions of liberalism/progressiveism that were sometimes very concerned about generally non-relevant facts like the age of the earth.

The Guardian is more of a general left-liberal institution than a "woke" institution, and left-liberals tend to be very concerned with things like that, as you said.

I wouldn’t consider The Guardian left-liberal. They are socialists through and through, if more moderate than revolutionary socialists.

How do you mean?

I’d assume progressives, even “woke” progressives, still take the same stances on plenty of random trivia. The fact you don’t see it is more an artifact of the availability heuristic.

After all, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Yes, wokes by and large hold the same views about history and archeology and science that previous progressive movements did. I mean I’m sure if you looked you could find plenty of wokes that embrace weirdness about Yakub and the tribe of Shabbaz or Native American creationism or some other kind of non-white coded pseudoscience, but by and large it’s just… not a major focus, and it’s striking the extent to which wokes don’t care very much about factual accuracy wrt to these things. Like, bush era progressives might have been wrong about some of their scientific or historical views, but it wasn’t because they didn’t care.

This doesn't explain why they go after period with blackwashed historical figures, movies that portray slave raiders as abolitionists (The Woman King), or purveyors of hotepism in general.

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