[A]nother race may have pre-dated native Americans.
....Dr Gonzalez told BBC News Online: "We believe that the older race may have come from what is now Japan, via the Pacific islands and perhaps the California coast....this discovery, although it is very significant, raises more questions than it solves." This seems like real news to me: the 'Bering Straits' route is still the dominant theory of pre-Colombian migration, is it not? Yet clearly, for anthropologists, it hasn't that simple for quite some time. Are we on the verge of a new consensus about human expansion across the globe? Or is this doomed to fail, like previous speculation? [Kon-Tiki, anyone?]
posted by dash_slot- on Dec 3, 2002 - 42 comments

HOW TO GET RICH, by Jared Diamond.
[via Boing-Boing] An academic justification for the pluralist society? Clay Shirley (guest blogger @ B-B) makes the point: "In a finding that everyone worried about having a single global IP regime should read, Diamond concludes that innovation requires having several different legal, cultural and technological regimes at the same time, in competition with one another. Columbus had to go to several countries before he got funding for the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Had there been a pan-European agreement on naval expeditions, he would never have left port." [More inside]
*Warning*: 12, easily read pages in link. I hope this thread is a grower...
posted by dash_slot- on Nov 14, 2002 - 30 comments