A former MIT Lincoln Lab researcher dedicated years of his life to demonstrating, (in purely technical terms) the contributions of mid-19th-c-to-prewar German technologists to science & history. Underpinned by archive citations & scans throughout, it makes for good reading (and requires no purchase to read).
Being 4000+ pages, I’ve found it works well as a reference to sci-technical topics of interest to me rather than a front-to-back readthrough.
In context of possible early Peruvian civilizations, definitely don't read the below; it's obviously an undersubstantiated pseudoscientific rabbit-hole not worth your curiosity and that your productive workday can not afford.
This is pseudoscience nonsense spread by some huckster and it's not worth anyones time and is disrespectful to the people of Peru. It's a modern hoax
> "They're not extraterrestrials. They're dolls made from animal bones from this planet joined together with modern synthetic glue," said Flavio Estrada, an archeologist with Peru's Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences.
"It's totally a made-up story," Estrada added.
> Joshua McDowell said: 'The bodies studied by Estrada were not related to any specimen that we have studied. They were folk dolls made to look like tridactyls confiscated at the airport.
The dolls in that article were confiscated in the mail and are made for tourists. The creator of those dolls has explained this already, and they are unrelated to the bodies discovered near Ica.
Here’s an X-ray comparison between the two where it’s very obvious that there’s a difference between the modern dolls and the archaeological discoveries:
Even if you’re incredulous that these bodies were living creatures, no one disputes their carbon dating of 500-1500 years old and this has been confirmed by multiple labs. It’s not possible to construct bodies from biological material that is that old, so if they were constructed it would have to have been done by ancient Peruvians. This begs the question of why ancient Peruvians were making constructions of beings that look remarkably similar to modern aliens as described by UFO experiencers:
The archaeological discoveries are being studied by the University of Ica and other South American scientists across many disciplines. The South American cultures also have a long history of depicting tridactyl beings in their artworks, there are hundreds of examples but here’s one:
So it’s really quite ridiculous to suggest this is disrespectful to Peruvians. Their own culture describes these creatures, and their scientists are the ones promoting the authenticity of the bodies. You’re just propagating ignorance.
Skepticism has turned into a religion, the rational perspective here is that we have a genuine mystery that needs further investigation.
Show me a peer reviewed paper about these mummies.
It is hard not to be skeptical when all the evidence appears to come from the person who "discovered" them and who has a long documented history of hoaxes from a skinned monkey that was claimed to be an alien to epoxied bat remains with eyes painted with phosphorescent paint which was claimed to be a "demon fairy."
Jaime Maussan did not discover them, a Peruvian grave robber and French explorer did.
There is no conclusive peer reviewed paper, but just because something that would be the greatest and most controversial discovery in the history of mankind hasn’t met the highest standard of evidence yet doesn’t mean it’s false. I’m arguing against the flippant dismissal of this story, I’m not against reasonable skepticism and further investigation.
Looking up the grave robber, Leandro Benedicto Rivera Sarmiento aka Mario, brings up some very interesting articles.
At least according to this news article, Peruvian authorities claim the remains and that were modified at St. Louis Gonzaga University with university officials using various animal parts and charges were made against the grave robber for, among other things, fraud.
You're linking to random twitter posts, with one of them mentioning a random reddit user with "throwaway" in his name, but "Skepticism has turned into a religion"? Please link to any credible source, just one.
Here is a 2023 hearing where dozens of South American scientists across various relevant specialties present their findings and argue for the bodies’ authenticity: https://youtu.be/MwZkXwuMdsw
> Here is the breast plate depicting a tridactyl being
Ok, ignoring the fact that various cultures drew all sorts of things from lion-headed people to feathered dragons so someone drawing little more than a stick figure hardly means it's real, but that could easily be a three toed sloth which have three very long claws on their hands and feet.
Never mind that the Nazca lived like 1500 miles away from the Quimbaya.
> Here is a website with the carbon dating reports
That shows a large difference in age between body parts from one of the mummies. In one of the reports, it shows a 6000 year age cap between the skin and the bone.
One DNA analysis says it contains DNA from multiple humans and that there isn't evidence the hand and left foot from the same mummy belong to the same person.
This all screams hoax. It looks as if someone stitched together multiple mummies.
> 2018 hearing conducted by the Peruvian Congress where their scientists
Jose de la Cruz believes they are authentic bodies, he is in both of the hearings I linked to. He’s explained that he wrote the paper considering both perspectives because he would not have been able to get it published otherwise. The topic of the paper is an analysis method, not the authenticity of the bodies. From the paper itself:
> They are biological in nature. At the available
resolution of the CT-scanning, no manipulation of
Josephina’s skull can be detected. The density of the
face bones matches very well the density of the rest
of the skull. No seams with glues, etc. are obvious,
and the whole skull forms one unit.
> Based on the above, if one is convinced that the
finds constitute a fabrication, one has to admit at the
same time that the finds are constructions of very
high quality and wonder how these were produced
hundreds of year ago (based on the C14 test), or even
today, with primitive technology and poor means
available to huaqueros, the tomb raiders of Peru.
on the other hand, I enjoyed "The Lost World" adventure fantasy book quite a lot as a kid, and now it seems there is science for certain dinosaur era creatures in some places.. so maybe fantastic nonsense has a place in a spectrum, as long as it is identified as "speculative" or whatever
I still struggle with the repeated assertions from the scicommss set that the 'neanderthals died out' or 'humans outcompeted neanderthals who went extinct', while at the same time acknowledging that 3% of DNA of everyone outside the African content is neanderthal. With that being the limit of 'the data' generally cited at hadn't, wouldn't a gradual, passively amicable merging (e.g. absorption) be just as explanatory as that Neanderthal's 'went extince' or 'were outcompeted'?
It's interesting to think about, and yes, I would think it's more accurate to consider that homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis are part of what became us, and in that case it seems odd/wrong to talk about them being outcompeted when there was interbreeding and their descendents are still here.
However they are still extinct!
It reminds me of the historical narratives in the UK about Viking settlers. We were taught (in the 80s and 90s) to think of the vikings as an invasive force, who were and remained an alien population, who raised levies from the poor, honest britains, and who eventually left or were overcome or just faded from view or whatever. We tended to then skip to the Norman conquest and not talk about it too much. But it's clear in the narrative that the Vikings are 'them' and the saxons are 'us'.
Only when you look at the actual history, the viking people settled and intermarried, cross-pollinated culturally and religiously and are firmly 'us' (if you're British). As a political force, the Norman conquest put an end to their rule of the northern part of England, but it's not like they suddenly all went 'home' after a couple of hundred years of settling.
They had been vikings. They integrated very quickly on the continent, inter-married with locals and absorbed the culture within a couple of generations. It was nothing like the power structure that was put in place in England.
It doesn’t seem that much of a coincidence that some of the history’s foremost boat-based pillagers and raiders were the descendants of Vikings, right?
I think it's because that 3% number is so small, it actually comes down to "outcompeted". A merger of two equally fit sub-species would result in more DNA persisting.
I think that's the crux of the cognitive dissonance we all experience when described the trope for the first time. 3% of group B's genes persisting eons later in the combined genome A+B isn't necessarily reflective of the original relative size of the population of B vs. A. Evolution only countenances which genes conferred a survival benefit edge to persist.
Suppose population A was one million individuals, and population B was only one hundred (a 10000X disparity). Assume complete absorption of B into A over an instantaneous period of time. The proportional genetic representation argument, if it were operative, would imply that eons later, only 0.01% of the combined genome is from population B. Only that's not how genetics works - what matters is how much of a survival benefit did population B's genes confer on the inheriting offspring? To put up a concrete example, if population B had a gene conferring immunity to a regionally endemic pathogen, then that pop. B immunity gene is going to quickly saturate representation in the offspring populations as pathogen-vulnerable population members die off from disease.
Isn't there already an overlap in the upper 90% between humans and apes? I don't know how much the neanderthal DNA differed back then, but it couldn't be more than that, could it? So wouldn't 3% of the total be at least a third of the parts that did differ?
It's always confusing how those DNA comparisons are worded. We share almost 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. But this just means that if you go down the genome, we have 99% of the same types of genes. And that's true even though we don't even have the same number of chromosomes as chimps! (We also share 50% of DNA with bananas - which just shows how incredibly complex basic stuff like cell respiration is.)
This is different than the statement that you share 50% of your DNA with your siblings, of course. Because in that case, you actually have the exact identical alleles as your siblings in 50% of your DNA.
The 3% neanderthal DNA is the second type of comparison.
The 99% identity with chimps is extremely misleading without clear qualification.
The fact that it has been used without qualification has a lot to do with the fact that most of our genome was assumed to be junk, which we know today is not the case, per the ENCODE project for example.
Thus, the 99% number needs to stop being perpetuated.
Today we know that the alignable parts (parts that are similar enough that they can be aligned with each other) are down in the 80s percents between humans and chimps, which can be digged out from e.g. this recent big study (some numbers are in the paper, and some needs to be digged out of the supplementary material):
There are a number of ethnic groups (not species or subspecies, I realize) that are less than 3% of the gene pool today (and happened over a much shorter timespan I would suppose) such as Irish, Jewish, Armenian, etc. Would they be considered having been outcompeted at this point?
No. There are still 100% individuals of all those groups, and the timescale of recorded history is too small for the same kind of competition as between neanderthals and sapiens anyway.
I am pretty sure most experts in the field would share your assertion that the statement ("neanderthals died out") hides complexity.
Sometimes hiding complexity behind some ballpark statement can be useful tho. I teach media technology — and a useful simplification is to have students think about inputs and outputs in an abstract fasbion first, then we can talk about signal types and levels and maybe impedances. But in reality a mere piece of wire with a shield can get infinitely more complex and fill a whole academic career. It just isn't useful to start talking about it that way unless you like to get rid of students. I tend to mention simplifications when I use them however, something I wish more scientific journalism did.
I’m debating whether nested folders should be used at all in my PKMs. I’m starting to think everything should be in the root folder. Less likely to render searchability incomplete due to some function or widget breaking.
For me it won't be a real command-line tool until I run into a problem and I get my very own open-source champion on support forums undermining my self-confidence & motivation by asking me "Why would I want to do that?"
While I’m receptive to the fact that RAGs have performance limitations, and that graph database-based solutions may avoid hallucinations, wouldn’t your rhetorical position be best served by offering a trial portal for users to upload their own document corpora and see for themselves that prompts to Stardog never result in hallucinations? Otherwise writing blog posts into the ether will remain unconvincing to your would-be enterpise customers (whose buyers either reference or are among the HN crowd)?
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