
Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago? - diodorus
http://www.livescience.com/53883-ancient-europeans-vanished-after-ice-age.html
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cfcef
It's always 'climate change'. Dozens of megafauna disappear? 'climate change'.
Whole tribes with fortifications suddenly disappear? 'climate change'.
Wholesale population replacement? 'climate change'. It's our age's "peoples
don't migrate, pots do". It's gotten to the point that when I read about the
latest population genetics result show introgression or replacement and they
invoke 'climate change', I no longer know if it's a case where it could be
climate change or just the usual total refusal to speculate about pre-historic
warfare and predation.

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justinator
I mean, reason why humans left Africa, walked upright and grew big brains?

Climate change.

Think about how many times you control your local micro climate around you.
Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever.

It's a big force in the human condition.

~~~
restalis
"Think about how many times you talk about the weather with whomever."

About as many as the moments in which we have to talk with somebody but lack
something better to break the ice!

__________

P.S.: I've read so far about a number of possible cases for which humans
started to walk upright and none had climate change as a primary cause.

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Kaius
Its peculiar that a group with a specific DNA marker would be wiped out so
completely by climate change while another group was not (or at least
prospered at a later time in the same region).

Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that
wiped out anyone it contacted and the separation of the 2 groups (N and M) in
different locations protected enough of the N group for it to prosper. Also
isolated pockets of M carriers who had migrated beyond the infected area
survived.

~~~
restalis
"Could this more easily be explained by an aggressive disease or plague that
wiped out anyone it contacted"

This sounds so familiar! "The previous local populations just vanished and we,
the current inhabitants, had nothing to do with it, cross my heart!"

The dramatic change should have been very beneficial to the hunter-gatherers.
They survived so long in tundra but they somehow couldn't cope with the
abundance of plants and plant eating venison brought along? Come on! It's more
likely that the previous harsh conditions weren't that inviting for the better
hunters of N type super-haplogroup living somewhere else, and as soon as that
changed so did the hunting lands' owners!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Disease is nothing to sneeze at! One new virus could quite possibly have wiped
out an entire population (as it did so often in more recent human history).
The end of the glaciers was the perfect condition to increase mobility and
thus disease vectors.

In fact, this is so inevitable we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen,
before speculating on less-likely scenarios?

~~~
restalis
"we'd have to explain why it couldn't happen, before speculating on less-
likely scenarios"

The colonization of Americas is the perfect counter-example for disease wipe-
out explanation. Pre-Columbian American population had no immunity whatsoever
to a bunch of serious diseases (some of which managed to become pandemics back
in colonizer's homelands), diseases that have accumulated over millennia
(since the last Bering overland/over-ice human crossing)! You'd expect that on
first Columbian contacts there should have appeared a pandemic so severe over
the whole Americas that after a few years the Europeans should have had no one
alive to encounter! Not only they still encountered, but long after the first
contact they also had a hard time dealing with local resistance of
underdeveloped tribes which had worse medical conditions than what was to be
had in ancient Rome! Not only that locals haven't been wiped out, but they
managed to contribute in a large quote to nowadays's Ibero-America's genotype
despite the European settlers' massive migration! So yes, I think it's enough
reason to consider the disease a less likely cause for a continental scale
wipe-out (which is what the article was talking about).

~~~
JoeAltmaier
A perfect example! Estimates are that 100 million aboriginal Americans were
wiped out by diseases brought by Europeans. Most of the population of North
America succumbed. The largest dieoff in human history.

We'll never really know the depth of native culture pre-Columbian because of
this.

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cellularmitosis
Those who find this interesting might also find the theories of Randall
Carlson interesting:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R31SXuFeX0A)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8)

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MichalSikora
In my opinion not always "climate change" but one of the main factor. For me
main factor is opportunity to moder human to acclimate for this factores. Yes,
climate changes are important but more value is respond for that e.g. better
groups organisation, better equipment. In that time if you do not acclimate
quick you died

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jhildings
Maybe because they didn't learn to write proper headlines explaining the
content of an article ?

