Ancient Australian 'Superhighways' Suggested By Massive Supercomputing Study (sciencemag.org) 56
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When humans first set foot in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, they faced the perilous task of navigating a landscape they'd never seen. Now, researchers have used supercomputers to simulate 125 billion possible travel routes and reconstruct the most likely "superhighways" these ancient immigrants used as they spread across the continent. The project offers new insight into how landmarks and water supplies shape human migrations, and provides archaeologists with clues for where to look for undiscovered ancient settlements.
It took weeks to run the complex simulations on a supercomputer operated by the U.S. government. But the number crunching ultimately revealed a network of "optimal superhighways" that had the most attractive combinations of easy walking, water, and landmarks. Optimal road map in hand, the researchers faced a fundamental question, says lead author Stefani Crabtree, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and the Santa Fe Institute: Was there any evidence that real people had once used these computer-identified corridors? To find out, the researchers compared their routes to the locations of the roughly three dozen archaeological sites in Australia known to be at least 35,000 years old. Many sites sat on or near the superhighways. Some corridors also coincided with ancient trade routes known from indigenous oral histories, or aligned with genetic and linguistic studies used to trace early human migrations. "I think all of us were surprised by the goodness of the fit," says archaeologist Sean Ulm of James Cook University, Cairns.
The map has also highlighted little-studied migration corridors that could yield future archaeological discoveries. For example, some early superhighways sat on coastal lands that are now submerged, giving marine researchers a guide for exploration. Even more intriguing, the authors and others say, are major routes that cut across several arid areas in Australia's center and in the northeastern state of Queensland. Those paths challenge a "long-standing view that the earliest people avoided the deserts," Ulm says. The Queensland highway, in particular, presents "an excellent focus point" for future archaeological surveys, says archaeologist Shimona Kealy of the Australian National University. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
It took weeks to run the complex simulations on a supercomputer operated by the U.S. government. But the number crunching ultimately revealed a network of "optimal superhighways" that had the most attractive combinations of easy walking, water, and landmarks. Optimal road map in hand, the researchers faced a fundamental question, says lead author Stefani Crabtree, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and the Santa Fe Institute: Was there any evidence that real people had once used these computer-identified corridors? To find out, the researchers compared their routes to the locations of the roughly three dozen archaeological sites in Australia known to be at least 35,000 years old. Many sites sat on or near the superhighways. Some corridors also coincided with ancient trade routes known from indigenous oral histories, or aligned with genetic and linguistic studies used to trace early human migrations. "I think all of us were surprised by the goodness of the fit," says archaeologist Sean Ulm of James Cook University, Cairns.
The map has also highlighted little-studied migration corridors that could yield future archaeological discoveries. For example, some early superhighways sat on coastal lands that are now submerged, giving marine researchers a guide for exploration. Even more intriguing, the authors and others say, are major routes that cut across several arid areas in Australia's center and in the northeastern state of Queensland. Those paths challenge a "long-standing view that the earliest people avoided the deserts," Ulm says. The Queensland highway, in particular, presents "an excellent focus point" for future archaeological surveys, says archaeologist Shimona Kealy of the Australian National University. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Songlines (Score:3)
Not a single mention of songlines - the aboriginal oral method for recording safe routes across long distances - in over 100 references. That's pretty weak.
Re: Songlines (Score:1, Insightful)
Just a guess, but probably like smoking ceremonies and "welcome to country" they were invented by city people only just recently.
That's the great thing about having no writing, alphabet, or records. You can make anything up.
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Just a guess, but probably like smoking ceremonies and "welcome to country" they were invented by city people only just recently.
Well, that's one thing I was wondering. But given the almost exact overlap in topic I would have thought they could have spared a paragraph even if just to say "Songlines are irrelevant because they were invented by some stoner in 1964" or something.
That's the great thing about having no writing, alphabet, or records. You can make anything up.
Yeah, I know. The whole Dreamtime thing is very disappointing when you dig into it.
Re: Songlines (Score:1)
It is actually a real pity. Ernie Dingo ( great comedian, look him up) started that stuff up as a joke in the 80's and now they do it in Parliament House like it was an actual traditional thing.
It's a funny old world huh ?
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Being that this is a way of communicating safe routes, anything that is just made up could lead someone into danger and get killed, thus stopping the spread on that songline.
For cultures that are nomadic or semi-nomadic written communication and record keeping isn't efficient. If you are planning form moving from spot to spot, every season or even every decade. Books, Tablets, and nearly any of your possessions will need to be moved too, which is difficult to carry extra stuff, and will get damaged to a p
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And why would they mention song lines when the main work was done by a computer analyzing geo informations?
Re:Songlines (Score:4, Insightful)
And why would they mention song lines when the main work was done by a computer analyzing geo informations?
Because if it turned out that it matched the songlines in any statistically significant way it would be a major discovery in anthropology.
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Because if it turned out that it matched the songlines in any statistically significant way it would be a major discovery in anthropology.
Yeah, it most likely matches. But the computer scientists and geologist did not think about checking that. They probably never even heard about songlines.
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Superhighways! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Superhighways! (Score:3)
It's called a figure of speech. Look it up.
Also, not a single word or term has only one single definition. ... Note the singularity of "speaker"/"listener", meaning that it can he different for each two speaker/listener tuples and even for each context. Due to how our brains work, even the usagr ant mental processing of the word itself al
That is complete nonsense in the context of how communication works anyway.
A word or term is defined as the commonality of what the speaker and the listener think it means.
Re: Superhighways! (Score:2)
Ignore my typos. Touchscreen victim here. :/
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You might find it stupid, but if it resonates with people, it's going to be used, and nobody's going to gatekeep the meaning. Dictionaries report usage and meaning of language, **not** the other way around. Language evolves beyond an individual's or a group's control. This now reminds me of the disbanding of the Apostrophe Protection Society two years ago: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/1... [cnn.com]
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No it wasn't. The word "Internet" conveys very little.
What?
No, really, what the fuck are you on about? The name conveys what it is perfectly.
We rolled our eyes at the time because we're snobs
No, we rolled our eyes because the internet isn't comparable to a superhighway in really any sense. If anything it would be an entire worldwide road network, not just one highway, however super.
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Damn right, and I'm the 18 wheeler on the information superhighway!
Actually, the problem isn't with terminology or slang used, it's with the whole idea of a model without one shred of proof to back it up is claimed to offer insights into how migration happened in Australia. It's utter nonsense, speculation with high GFLOPS.
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They were claiming insights without one step in Australia taken. Utter junk science and junk anthropology.
Hypothetical idealism. (Score:3)
Obviously leads to large aggregations. As idealism does by definition.
Nothing I see here, suggests this is in any way related to reality though. (I had expected them to present actual satellite imagery showing the remaining traces of these "superhighways". Knowing that in reailty, they would be footpaths and would never have been busy anyway, by today's "busy highway" standards.)
So it's hypothetical.
Which leads me to conclude, that this is mostly navel gazing.
The really worrrying thing here, is that TFA just moves on, starting to treat is as a fact that can challenge existing
things. That is not scientific at all.
I can suggest things too. That's not news unless I do the crucial point of actually backing it up with observation.
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Nothing I see here, suggests this is in any way related to reality though. (I had expected them to present actual satellite imagery showing the remaining traces of these "superhighways".
Also absent - no mention of any fossil evidence used as a "pin" for any of these routes.
It really is just a complete fabrication - a computer model driven by nothing other than the hypothetical topography of Australia's predecessor, Sahul.
Easy walking (Score:3)
Yes we all know that the dry arid continent full of deserts and a million dangerous animals is perfectly characterised by "easy walking, water, and landmarks"
Mind you I once drove through the great stony desert and it was like a perfectly flat sea of rocks as far as the eye can see, there was one tree on the horizon, so I guess that would have made a great landmark.
These days they are decidedly more high tech, I think one landmark for a while was a Telstra payphone in the desert in Western Australia holding the record for the payphone the furthest distance from any civilisation in the world. I wonder if that one random phonebooth is still there...
Camel Cattle and Stock Route solution (Score:3)
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A harder question is how come birds or Elephants know when water has transformed oases 3-6 hundred miles away.
Elephants know because they have long memories. Long-lived birds, same. Short-lived birds "know" because there are lots of them, and enough of them can remember where there might be water, even though most of them don't know. You don't see the birds who didn't make it to water.
Eifelheim (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a remarkable book, both for its settings (now and middle-age germany), interesting aliens and ideas.
Wonder what the speed limit was? (Score:2)
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It's worse than Elizabeth Warren claiming she's native Cherokee. At least she has like... what was it? 5% cherokee or something?
The conclusion was that she likely had a native american ancestor (not necessarily Cherokee) around 6-10 generations back. So somewhere between 0.1% and 1.5%. It was amusing to watch the "fact checkers" bend over backward attempting to support her claims.
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Except her exact claim was that she had a Native American ancestor in her family.
You've either been misled, or are yourself attempting to mislead. Politifact article [politifact.com]. Suffice to say that she outright identified as "american indian" (and specifically Cherokee) rather than some nebulous claim that she had a native american ancestor.
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Also in the article it dispels the misrepresentation that you
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One of the fucking sentences in the article you linked: "Warren’s central offense dates back to the mid 1980s, when she first formally notified law school administrators that her family tree includes Native Americans. Warren said she grew up with family stories about both grandparents on her mother’s side having some Cherokee or Delaware blood." Her exact claim was she was told she had Cherokee or Delaware ancestors in her family tree.
Also in the article it dispels the misrepresentation that you claim she identified as Native American.
Warren herself didn’t trumpet this side of her family story. When applying to college and law school, records show that she either identified as white or declined to apply based on minority status.
Looks like you want to claim the opposite of what your link says. Is that your lack of reading comprehension or your dishonesty?
You're cherry picking the article. Here's more than once sentence:
"Elizabeth Warren’s avowed Native American heritage — which the candidate rarely if ever discusses on the campaign trail — was once touted by embattled Harvard Law School officials who cited her claim as proof of their faculty’s diversity," the article began. What the article revealed dated back more than a decade to diversity records kept by Harvard.
At a time when law schools faced public pressure to show greater ethnic diversity within their faculty, the university’s Crimson newspaper quoted a law school spokesman in 1996 saying Warren was Native American.
The Boston Globe followed the Herald with a report that the Association of American Law Schools listed Warren as a minority law teacher each year from 1986 to 1994. In that time, Warren went from being a law professor at the University of Texas, to the University of Pennsylvania, and finally in 1995 to Harvard University.
That association received faculty lists from law schools and sent personal profile forms to new faculty members. The group first asked about minority status in 1986.
Lest you respond with, "well, that's what someone else said about her, there's no proof she was the source of those" there's this, from the same article:
Warren refused to apologize, saying she didn’t know Harvard was promoting her that way. She did confirm, however, that she had told the law school association that she held a minority status.
"I listed myself (in the) directory in the hopes that might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something, with people who are like I am," Warren told reporters May 3, 2012. "Nothing like that ever happened. That was absolutely not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off."
Of course, you'll fall back on "none of that says she didn't just claim to have some distant ancestor" which was your original claim. A claim that is incorrect [boston.com].
Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren acknowledged for the first time late Wednesday night that she told Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania that she was Native American, but she continued to insist that race played no role in her recruitment.
“At some point after I was hired by them, I . . . provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard,’’ she said in a statement issued by her campaign. “My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I’m proud of it and I have been open about it.’’
Warren’s statement is her first acknowledgment that she identified herself as Native American to the Ivy League schools. While she has said she identified herself as a minority in a legal directory, she has carefully avoided any suggestion during the last month that she took further actions to promote her purported heritage.
Finally, just to drive the nail into the coffin on your incorrect claim, here's that bastion of the right, Vox, pointing out that W [vox.com]
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Finally, just to drive the nail into the coffin . . .
Woah, woah. So you had a different source which came to a different conclusion but you did not lead with that. Was I supposed to read your mind?
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Universities have lost all credibility on this. They have a woke agenda...
No, you have it backwards. As soon as a mouth-breather on the internet starts ranting about "a woke agenda" they lose all credibility.
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Key ideas needed (Score:2)
Re: Key ideas needed (Score:2)
I used to think that way more than I do now. But now I'm less inclined to dismiss brute force computation over an elegant mathematical proof for two reasons:
1. I've got a big-ass computer at work that lets me brute force things and jave found it useful
2. "God integrates empirically" as a great man once said. Running a moderately inefficient but controlled simulation experiment can lead to insights that symbol pushing won't.
I'm confused (Score:1)
fallacy and asserting the consequent (Score:2)
So they made a model that "might" show routes. But then claim it offers insights into how people migrated? No. Bad science, junk science.
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No. You skipped the entire 2nd paragraph of the summary.
The made a model that "might" show routes. Taking this list of potential routes, they then compared against known, existing archaeolgical sites. They then said "hey, this seems to line up -- let's check the other routes and see what we can find".
That's good science.
1. Make Model.
2. Compare model against exisitng data for fit.
3. Check if model can make accurate predictions or provide new insight.
4. Repeat.
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Re: fallacy and asserting the consequent (Score:1)
Except there were no villages. I don't think you appreciate how astoundingly primitive Aboriginal society is/was.
They had fire, and sometimes threw a crudely butchered kangaroo fur on their backs, but that was about it. Sharp rocks, pointy sticks, no farming, no real tools, no animal husbandry, no huts, no writing, no fabric or weaving, nothing.
Stone Age in every sense of the word. It's not a value judgement, just facts.
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