It's easy to forget them. Every country on the globe has an indigenous people. The countries that don't have them either killed them all in the middle ages or assimilated them completely. Apart from them there are swathes of illegal immigrant workers that are completely ignored and other socially excluded people.
Yup, there's an entire field within metahistory concerning how entire peoples are essentially erased from historical records due to conquest and/or genocide. It's a formalization of the famous addage, "history books are written by the winners."
Hayden White's metahistorical perspectives on how "narratives" shape history were really eye opening for me.
I think we should fight to preserve what cultures, people and languages we have left. The Ainu language is nearly extinct, and it represents an entirely separate language family from Japanese for example. Anthropology (especially linguistics too) is a jigsaw puzzle for which we're losing pieces every day. Plus it feels right to try to save them.
100% agree - my mom's family is Wayuu and we speak a dying language. I didn't grow up in the same ancestral lands my grandmother did, but I do try to retain my very basic grasp of the language. And I will encourage my kids to learn the basics.
It's too sad to think of the finality of culture, but this is the least I can do. I think it's great that some Ainu are relearning the language - it's such a strong cultural bond.
It's really good that you encourage your kids to learn! Languages carry so much culture, so assimilation programs in the US and Canada focused on breaking the teaching cycle of native languages to force cultural assimilation.
I'm white but I work with a Coast Salish language that the tribes are trying to bring back from extinction. Indian children were forced into boarding schools and beaten if they didn't speak English, so a generation grew up without learning and the last L1 speaker died a decade ago. So much was lost, but linguists and elders wrote down enough that revival is possible. It will take hard work and determination for entire tribes though, so it may never recover except in ceremonial usage.
I don't. As a member of a small ethnic group myself, I really don't understand why. Whatever it was that we had to give to the world has been given. None of us have been treated cruelly for being of a certain race (for the most part). We just chose to move away, marry others (because we're not race purists, like many 'indigineous' activists, I suppose?), raise our children, and be happy.
Not every society has produced things of equal value, and it's not particularly offensive to notice that.
This is not quite true. That some extinct languages of the Korean peninsula were related to Japanese on the basis of toponymy, is now nearly universally agreed on among linguists, whether they accept the Altaic hypothesis (or the recent "Transeurasian" rebranding of it) or reject the Altaic hypothesis.
The work on Korean toponymy is recent enough (and still ongoing) that it is missing in many older standard references for the history of Japanese. So, in a discussion like this, if a person mentions that the Japonic family is a language isolate, then it is helpful to add for readers less familiar with this subject that it isn’t completely isolated.
I've been watching Meerkat Manor recently. More than monkeys I feel we resemble meerkats. It was exactly like watching people. At the bottom of it, it boils down to family vs family, which is tribe vs tribe in larger units fighting over rights to exploit a territory.
History is written by those who care enough to write history. For over a 100 years historiography of the US Civil War was dominated by Southerners and there are plenty of other examples of political losers being most influential in historical memory. Machiavelli ensured Cesar Borgia will live forever by his writing and both of them lost. Sima Qian was castrated.
> To restate Sima Qian’s experience in less emotional terms: because he was principled enough to contradict the emperor in the presence of his court, Sima Qian was sentenced to castration. This was a death sentence—any self-respecting man of his day would commit suicide before submitting to the procedure. Everyone expected Sima Qian to do so. But in the end Sima Qian decided to accept the punishment and live the rest of his life in shame, because if he did not he would never finish the history he had started.
> Not every historian has the balls to a challenge despot face-to-face. For despotic Wudi was—the castration of Sima Qian was hardly the most despotic thing Wudi would do before his reign ended. It is but one episode in a string of terrors, one paint-stroke in a portrait of tyranny.
> But who painted the portrait? None other than the grand historian Sima Qian. We remember Wudi as Sima Qian chose to depict him. Had Wudi realized the influence his court astronomer would have on future generations, he might have treated him differently. But Wudi realized none of this. Sima Qian was published brutally and embarrassed publicly. He was a loser.
Not every country, look at the UK. I guess you can define indigenous people in a way anywhere that makes what you said true, but it's been a long while in a lot of places.
Even in the case of the UK, there are the crofters in Scotland. While not officially recognized by the Scottish government as an indigenous group, they have long been campaigning for it.
Well, I think there are two different things. One would be marginalized groups sharing common culture and deserving of recognition and protection, the other would an ethnicity having previous occupied an area and also having the qualities of the first group.
It seems like the Crofters are in the first group.
Oh I'm not scottish ... always thought gaelic languages were native to the islands but not recognised. Glad to see thats not the case. There are not many cultural references to it ... I came across it from the movie - Million Dollar Baby.
No. Unlike in Gaul, the British continued to speak a Celtic language througout Roman occupation. The Ancient British language was displaced by Anglo-Saxon in England but descendants of it are still spoken as minority languages in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
I'm not sure exactly who the indigenous people were in the present day UK, but surely you're not saying that they're still running things?
I just checked Wikipedia and the Celts seem to have come from central Europe, so I guess they aren't the original inhabitants, but another wave of invaders.
If you go back far enough, you could probably consider Neanderthals to be victims of genocide. But there could have been an even earlier wave of settlement, so were they really indigenous?
The point is that the concept of "indigenous" people is extremely limited, how large does a piece of virgin land which was never stolen need to be, for there to be nobody there but the indigenous people? Is there a length of time which makes a people indigenous after conquering land once?
Pre Roman invasion in 43 AD, Britons (Brythonic languages etc). 43 AD to roughly 400 AD, Romano Britons and various combinations and graduations thereof. Roughly 300 or 400 onwards, Saxons, Angles, Jutes start to turn up in these isles. The Romans are generally considered to have buggered off around 400ish.
The largely Angle/Saxon incursion was not a smooth considered invasion but more of a spreading out. Bear in mind that travelling by sea was generally easier than by land at the time. Heavily wooded hills are a pain to cross compared to sea with a decent wind. So the sea back then was not a barrier but actually helpful.
300?-1066 - What will become the UK etc is an amalgam of tiddly kingdoms and whatnot. What becomes England is Wessex, Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall - a bit Welsh - west wales), Kent, Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, Mercia, Deira and quite a lot more. There was the Danelaw and Dalegelt business with a bunch of homicidal viking folk. York's, and hence New York's names are derived from Jorvik which was the Danish name for the original town. The Romans called the place Eboracum.
The Mesolithic population represented by Cheddar man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man) may be the closest we know to the first inhabitants of the British Isles after the last ice age (10k yrs ago). There is evidence of habitation before the last ice age but no human remains have been found. Based on DNA analysis Cheddar man is thought to have had dark skin, blue eyes, and despite his name, been lactose intolerant:
Genocide isn't required to fundamentally transform or extinguish a culture. My knowledge of the history of the British isles is vague, but English culture has been heavily shaped by foreign occupation.
One example, large portion of words (~30%) are have either French roots, quite likely due to the Norman invasion:
> And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain.
Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end.
We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
The current majority culture is pretty new; about 1500 years (or maybe 1000, depending on what view you take on the Normans). There were a number of waves; before the Angles et al, the Romans, Celts, aforementioned bloody Beaker people, and various others. That’s for England; once you consider the rest of the UK it’s even messier.
>> What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?
This one's obvious; your tongue can't hold water the way a cat's does. Humans everywhere can cup water in their hands, but they suck it up rather than trying futilely to lick it up. I feel comfortable generalizing this into the past.
Not sure if you're joking yourself here, but the Stewart Lee quote is part of a skit he does about the stupidities of xenophobia, where he goes progressively further back in time getting more worked up parodying the imagined resistance of the existing inhabitants of Britain to the next wave of arrivals. It ends with him barking out some phrases in old English (?) and telling the audience to bugger off home if they can't speak the language. Pretty funny and prob on YouTube
London is majority non-indigenous (by any definition) today, with even a Pakistani leader in Sadiq Khan. In some areas, you can see a thousand head scarves for every White person. And this is not unusual across England and Ireland, in particular.
While it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, the UK's demographics trends indicate that you're wrong - it hasn't been a long while, it is now.
The UK doesn't talk much about its internal ethnic structure, but there are still traces of discrimination against people with the "wrong" accents.
The Troubles isn't usually called a war of colonialism, but it has the hallmarks: different languages and religious beliefs between groups which largely didn't intermarry? Long history of supremacy of one group over the other, including formally in law?
I mean, there's still Norf, Saf, London, and Westminster apart from them. There's some horrible stuff going on under the watch of one or the other, but unless we're using one of these fruity 21st century definitions of genocide, I'm just not seeing one going on right now in the UK, nor for the last 500 years or more.
As others have pointed out the UK has been conquered many times. But IIRC correctly the only nearly complete genocidal population replacement was when the indigenous hunter-gatherers were replaced by farmers. Among farming populations with hierarchical societies subjugation tends to replace complete replacement.
I had a similar thought while I was vacationing in Iceland of all places, so I googled it and I think there were no people on Iceland when it was settled. I'd be surprised if "every country" has this dynamic, but I do agree it's a lot more widespread than people would like to admit.
But the Icelandic settlers were eventually colonised by Norway. Those settlers may have originally come from the same geographical region that eventually turned into the kingdom of Norway, and subsequently colonised Iceland. But the only topics you could debate there is how much time has passed, and how different the groups are considered to be. After all, there’s reasonably strong evidence to support the theory that both the Icelandic settlers and the Norwegian colonialists originally migrated from Africa. Would the colonization Iceland in the 13th century be considered a significantly different event if the colonizing was being done by the Mongol Empire instead of the Kingdom of Norway? Because the only difference between those two states/empires would be an arbitrary judgement about how different they are, and the amount of time that had passed since they diverged from their shared origin.
The history of all nations and peoples revolves around claiming land, and then fighting over it.
Even the act of founding a country carries many of the same sins as conquest or colonization. When a country is founded, a person or group of people decides that they are the ruler of everybody within some particular boundaries on the map. The only difference between that and conquest is whether or not those people had an established ruler.
There are important differences. Iceland was originally settled mainly by Norwegians and there was no violent takeover. Compared to a theoretical Mongol conquest, where the invaders would be very ethically and culturally different, and legendarily brutal, I think there really is no comparison. And indeed I think we shouldn’t trivialize those differences; colonialism has devastated cultures across the globe, and we should acknowledge that, instead of making some vague “well that’s the story of humanity” defense.
The history of humanity is very literally one of violence, conquest and subjugation. Your comment falls into the fallacy of presentism:
> uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
History is not divided into victims and perpetrators in this respect, the only distinction you can make is that at any particular point in time any particular group may have been on the winning or losing end of it.
> colonialism has devastated cultures across the globe, and we should acknowledge that
To what end is it important to acknowledge this? The history of all people is drenched in the blood and atrocity of the past. Colonialism is not different from any other form of historic state or empire building.
Presentism (I’ve discovered after googling) is not a fallacy, it’s some niche criticism of eurocentrism that’s being reappropriated by the cultural right to try and whitewash some pretty atrocious stuff. Here’s an excerpt from Forbes [1]:
> Let’s acknowledge that most modern Americans are not fans of slavery, the confederacy or racism. But is it right or useful to go back into history and cleanse the campus of references to those events and people who, in an earlier era with a different set of values, participated in them? So much is lost if we insist on this approach to history:
–Leaders are not perfect. In fact, the very qualities that may lead to huge success may also result in grand failures. Ask Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton or, yes, Woodrow Wilson. We’re better off celebrating and learning from leaders warts and all.
–History itself is full of failures and successes. Before the U.S., essentially every culture and country had slavery. Only in America was the prospect of eliminating it on the table at the founding, and eventually it was accomplished, Are we now to cleanse the public square of all failures?
——-
Generally, I think slavery and mass murder/subjugation are pretty awful, no matter the era, no matter if someone else is also doing it.
> In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past.
> The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s.
Your comment goes beyond a typical ad hominem, you’re dismissing an argument simply because it has previously been used at least once by people you disagree with.
Yeah man, I read the same Wikipedia article, and now I know way more about "Whiggery" than I ever really wanted to. It's also got a couple people trying to add that Forbes article and "intellectual dark web" Sam Harris into it [1].
Presentism is a very specific kind of Eurocentrism founded on the teleological idea that, essentially, this is all God's plan and we're on the right side of it. Its meaning is changing a little in the modern era, now that we're looking back on our (human) history and recoiling. This naturally causes us some dissonance; the classic example is Jefferson's devotion to liberty... as a slaveholder who personally ordered his slaves flogged [2]. And classically, presentism would say that the US was on the correct course, and these other peoples (indigenous Americans, people we brought over to enslave, etc.) would inevitably lose out, because they're not on the right side of history [3].
But again in the modern era, we're seeing the meaning change from "we're on the right side of history and therefore can do no wrong" to "our values now are so different, if Andrew Jackson were alive today he'd be in prison". I think this is right; I don't want to erase Jefferson from history, but I do think I'd feel weird as an African-American to see slaveowners exalted everywhere (even money, save Lincoln and Grant everyone on there was a slaveowner). I mean, as a white guy I feel weird about it anyway.
But while I think the wiki article is pretty thinly cited, it does reference an opinion piece from the president of the American Historical Association which I actually really like. Here are some good bits:
> I'm not arguing that identity politics have no place in historical study; women's history, African American history, Latino history, gay and lesbian history, and the like have all made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of history. It is hard to imagine American history in this country without some element of national identity in it. And present-day concerns have helped revivify topics, such as imperialism, that needed reconsideration.
> Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline.
> Students readily absorb these attitudes of temporal superiority, but they also stand in some ways as our best bulwark against it. When I teach Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history to students in UCLA's history of history class, they at first seize upon his Eurocentric, indeed racist, comments about Africa's place in world history, but they quite readily see that their condescension toward Hegel derives from Hegel's own worldview. Hegel was the great codifier of Western temporal superiority; for Hegel, all truth is revealed through the progression of history, which means that those in the present always have a better shot at grasping truth than do people in the past. Students understand quite quickly that those who follow them will have the same retrospective advantage over them that they enjoy vis à vis Hegel.
So, specifically, I'm not dismissing your characterization of my comment as presentist (?) because it's got some new modern relevance. I'm dismissing it because I buy the moral relativism critique: I think these things (colonialism, here) were always bad, and I think your attempt to dismiss my characterization as presentism is applying mor...
Every country on the globe has an indigenous people.
Nearly every area in the globe was occupied by an earlier group before it was occupied by the present occupying group. Many areas had wave after wave of occupying group, some eliminating the previous group, some merging with the previous group. The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks, the Mid East is mess, India has fabric of different groups, China was conquered by multiple waves of "barbarians", etc.
Many of these conquests and settlement processes have unspeakably cruel. European process stand out for being the largest and most recent but not necessarily otherwise. The cause for hope is that just hearing all this, most people want something better.
It seemed a little weird that China would want to “settle” Tibet considering that the most economically prosperous regions of the Country are on the Coastal regions. What are the incentives to abandon your home and move to a strange land?
1. Tibet is high ground. Source of China's rivers and a security nightmare if someone ever puts artillery up there.
2. Nationalistic pride. A lot of modern China's identity is tied up with using the perceived territories of the old Qing empire as a baseline measure for the country's standing in the world. Tibet was part of the Qing empire (disregarding how pre-modern empires controlled territory in arrangements that gave local rulers much more leeway than modern nations) so not having Tibet as part of modern China would be seen as a major defeat. Try asking a Chinese national to explain why the PRC fought to keep Tibet but not Mongolia despite both being part of the old Qing empire and watch the mental gymnastics.
Those strategic considerations explain why China would prefer to keep Tibet under their control, but that could also be achieved by the Tibetan members of the CCP ruling the region, Tibetan members of the PLA patrolling the borders, Tibetan members of the MSS surveilling the population, and so on. It's not clear whether having large numbers of Han Chinese migrate there is necessary or even helpful. (It's not like Han Chinese have never revolted against the government.)
The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
> China would prefer to keep Tibet under their control, but that could also be achieved by the Tibetan members of the CCP ruling the region, Tibetan members of the PLA patrolling the borders, Tibetan members of the MSS surveilling the population, and so on.
You're just asking for Tibet to revolt at that point. Obviously you know this, but longstanding imperial Chinese policy was that no official was ever allowed to administer his own home province. There was good reason for that.
> The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
Some of them are just assigned as settlers by the government. I don't know how significant the phenomenon is, but e.g. a friend of mine told me that her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
> Obviously you know this, but longstanding imperial Chinese policy was that no official was ever allowed to administer his own home province.
The PRC requires that "The chairman of an autonomous region, the prefect of an autonomous prefecture or the head of an autonomous county shall be a citizen of the nationality exercising regional autonomy in the area concerned." http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...
I'm not sure whether subdivisions in an autonomous area are automatically autonomous as well, but if so, that would require local Tibetan governments at all administrative levels to be lead by Tibetans.
That doesn't mean they can't use the old tactic of promoting officials across regional borders to prevent individuals from building up their own little kingdoms. E.g. the current chairman of Tibet is a Tibetan from Yunnan, so technically he isn't ruling his home province. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Dalha
> her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
How does settlement work in that case? Did they give him a plot of land to farm or a job at a SOE or did they simply order him to stay in Xinjiang and find some way to make a living there?
> It seemed a little weird that China would want to “settle” Tibet considering that the most economically prosperous regions of the Country are on the Coastal regions. What are the incentives to abandon your home and move to a strange land?
I asked someone once what the point of China owning Xinjiang was. He responded "we don't want them to attack us".
For Tibet, I agree with magicsmoke that it is incredibly significant as the source of both of China's rivers. I can't imagine China willingly ceding control over those.
Well that's technically an ethnocide. There's plenty of that happening as well.
The funniest pattern you can see in news - everyone talks about the other, while ignoring their own mess. Chinese media will bring up Native Americans while American media will bring up Tibet or Honk Kong or Taiwan. Middle East Muslims will complain about Palestine while conveniently ignoring Assyrians.
> The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks
The language of modern Greeks is directly descended from that of the ancients. From classical times through the hellenistic period, the Byzantine Empire up to today there is a continuity of culture.
> The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks
I don’t believe this is true, FWIW. If I’m not mistaken, most of the Mediterranean as had relatively little genetic replacement since the Indo-Europeans first stablished themselves. There has been cultural turnover in the Middle East, but this has mostly taken the form of elites engaging in tax farming conquered populations, rather than genocide and replacement.
The ancient Greeks were distinctly different from the modern day Greek gene pool. For 400 years, Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. During that time the Turks were benevolent rulers, allowing the Greeks all the customs and privileges they previously had, except for paying tax to the Turks. Intermarriage was allowed and even the local Turkish bureaucrats were encouraged to have (take?) Greek wives. Much of the modern Greek cuisine comes from turkey and the Middle East. Ancient Greeks had a high proportion of blond and redheads. Today, that is a rare sight.
I doubt it. Blondness is evolved for colder climates, that means the northern europe. Eastern europe has some slav influence so they might be blonde. This is the same reason why polar bears are white and other bears are brown or black. Southern europe has the mediterranean climate and so does turkey, isreal, lebanon and morocco.
Being a black person in snow would attract predators and they would die so people with lighter skins who could camouflage easily in the background would survive.
FWIW, nobody actually knows why fair hair and complexions evolved. There are various hypotheses which sound more or less plausible, but that’s all they are. This is not a settled question by any measure.
>The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks, the Mid East is mess, India has fabric of different groups, China was conquered by multiple waves of "barbarians", etc.
All the areas you're quoting have changed very little since the Bronze Age.
> China was conquered by multiple waves of "barbarians"
The fact the imperial power belonged to foreign dynasties (mainly the Yuan and the Qing) doesn’t mean the people itself and its culture was erased. Actually in case of Manchu the reverse happened with the ruling elite taking Chinese culture while forgetting it’s own culture.
> The countries that don't have them either killed them all in the middle ages or assimilated them completely
It's also the case that indigenous people killed each other off. For example, the Māori genocided the pacifist Moriori and the Comanche came very close to doing so with the Apache.
What do you mean by pacifist? Did they not have a culture or preparedness for conflict or did they actually have a pacifist philosophy that would prevent them from entering conflict to defend themselves?
Interesting. Thanks for info. According to Wikipedia, the young did want to fight but the older less flexible generation overruled them and thus were overrun.
> Every country on the globe has an indigenous people. The countries that don't have them either killed them all in the middle ages or assimilated them completely.
Depending on how you define "country" the Pitcairn Islands are an exception:
> The earliest known settlers of the Pitcairn Islands were Polynesians who appear to have lived on Pitcairn and Henderson, and on Mangareva Island 540 kilometres (340 mi) to the northwest, for several centuries. They traded goods and formed social ties among the three islands despite the long canoe voyages between them, which helped the small populations on each island survive despite their limited resources. Eventually, important natural resources were exhausted, inter-island trade broke down and a period of civil war began on Mangareva, causing the small human populations on Henderson and Pitcairn to be cut off and eventually become extinct.
> Although archaeologists believe that Polynesians were living on Pitcairn as late as the 15th century,[citation needed] the islands were uninhabited when they were rediscovered by Europeans.
The Polynesians were there, but they died off before the Europeans came.
> Every country on the globe has an indigenous people.
And in most cases every "indigenous people" have actually replaced other indigenous people that were there before but for which we have no recorded history.
Except that in the case of Ainu, they are not indigenous to Japan, the indigenous people of Japan is the Jomon and they were already in Hokkaido centuries before the Ainu existed.
The more common accepted theory according to recent DNA studies is that the Ainu are actually Siberians who mixed with Jomon and also mainland Japanese.
Saying that the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido is a common misconception of Western scholars, they somehow insist in this historical error.
> “We caught the bears as cubs and raised them as a member of the family. They shared our food and lived in our village. When the time came, we set one free back into nature and killed the other to eat.”
> Having treated the bear well in life, her people believe the spirit of the sacred animal, which they worship as a deity, will ensure the continued good fortune of their community.
FWIW, I think it’s more complicated than that. If it was only about justification, they could have figured out a way to justify eating both bears. Plus, bears eat a lot of food. Releasing one made the entire transaction a net negative from a caloric point of view.
You're absolutely correct, and shame on those who downvoted you.
Indigenous or not, humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us. I hope this is going to be one of those inconceivable mentalities which they will point to with curiosity and sadness.
And judging by the number of people here who disagree with me, our shabby human race has a long way to go before we reach any semblance of 'civilization'.
Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable.
People tend not to hold animals to the same standards (compassion, empathy) that they hold humans to. A human mauling a baby deer on camera would be lambasted, whereas a tiger doing exactly the same would be considered 'natural'.
Agreed though that nature is anything but 'nice'. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been lucky enough to be almost entirely shielded from nature by human society.
The difference is that humans claim to be 'intelligent'. Homo sapiens literally means wise person.
Where is our consciousness, self-awareness? The invention of religion - as the ultimate moral or ethical framework - is exposed as a fraud. That's several millennia of philosophy up in flames.
So I maintain that we should hold humans to a higher standard - the one that we believe we're entitled to, but seldom live up to.
I visited the Ainu Museum in in Hokkaido about five years ago, and at least in that modern day setup they did not treat the bears well. There were two bears in small cages, and for 100 yen tourists could feed them "crackers" through a long metal tube. It was heartbreaking to see.
It’s supposedly more complicated since Yamato people are partly descended from Jomon who are supposedly also one of the ancestral groups of the Ainu. Both are indigenous and have been for over 1500 years. Or perhaps more accurately, the invasion started over 2000 years ago and was complete a few hundred years ago. Seems somewhat similar to Okinawa.
It’s like a technologically more advanced people subjugating their cousins.
Kind of seems like there were scattered tribes at first, that gradually spread and grew apart until they ended up (mostly) assimilating into one civilization.
Not unsurprisingly the biggest two, the Ainu and the remaining Japanese civilization, seem to correspond to the two biggest islands.
I don't know. The Ainu look very different, which has led to much speculation as to their origins.
This suggests to me that the Ainu while maybe sharing some ancestry with the dominant Yamato people have a very different history, with the Ainu probably sharing less genetic history with modern East Asians.
My read of it was that there was a Jomon culture that was superseded by the Yamato culture. The Yamato culture was mostly from people coming from what is now Korea but there probably was admixture with the people already there.
But this peopling was a good 2000+ years ago. So it’s a bit like saying my ancestors were here 13000 years ago and most of yours were here only 2000 years ago.
Furthermore, we have no idea how many waves of people have migrated to those islands.
The Ainus are left on Hokaido and the few scatered islands in the North because the Japanese pushed from the South (their ancestor originally having come from Eastern Korea). The complete colonization of Honshu itself wasn't achieved before the Early Modern period.
The Emishi [1], another native population, were featured in Hayao Miyazaki's classic, Princess Mononoke. One of the main characters, Ashitaka, was Emishi.
Some claims state that the Emishi and Ainu are related, but this is debated.
There are a few episodes of the anime Golden Kamuy that touch over the lifestyle and culture of the Ainu natives. I've only seen the first season, but it was a very delightful and insightful watch.
The vaguely "caucasoid" appearance they have is generally theorized as the result of either (or a combination of) two things:
1. A relatively recent (past ~20k years) migration from Central Siberia correlated with the Ancestral North Eurasians [1], who contributed significant ancestry to Amerindians, Europeans, and Central/South Asians. They were phenotypically intermediate between modern East and West Eurasians, hence the unique combination of features often found in Amerindians.
2. A remnant of a much earlier (~50k years) population descended from humans who took the Southern Route [2] across Eurasia. They contributed significant ancestry to the Australian Aboriginals, certain South and Southeast Asian populations, and potentially some groups in the Amazon. The ancestry contributed to those Amerindians in the Amazon would've had to come from this population coming up across East Eurasia, where they could've left behind (or contributed to) populations like the Ainu.
West Eurasians (Caucasoids) and South Eurasians (Australoids) share a few distinctive traits that are shared by the Ainu, notably prominent brow ridges, lack of epicanthic folds, and heavier facial hair. So purely from a phenotypic point of view it's difficult to determine their origin. Genomic analyses also tend to be inconclusive, with Ainu often clustering with other Siberian groups rather than some special outgroup.
This isn't phrenology in the racist and pseudoscientific sense at all. It's not even trying to correlate anthropometrics. The Ainu are actually a distinct people, and noticing the readily apparent distinctions between the Ainu people and the other inhabitants of the Japanese islands is no more racist than noting that African peoples tend to have darker skin than Europeans. Erasing distinctions rather than recording them does nothing more than making it easier to erase genocide from the historical record.
Some 19th century accounts by Westerners of encounters with Ainu are at [1], [2], and [3]. More can be found in books listed in the bibliography at [4].
I came across Ainu culture while driving through Kuchiro in Hokkaido. We stayed one night in the city, unbeknown to us it was the night of their yearly Marimo festival [1].
Marimo is an extremely odd moss ball that only grows in their lake [2]. Once to the brink of extinction, the Ainu celebrates every year by strolling around the city with the prettiest marimo. They celebrate through the night with traditional dances. It was a unique experience.
Every article about Hokkaido written by Western scholars are outdated or tend to have this historical misconception about the Ainu being indigenous to Hokkaido, such as this BBC piece.
The Ainu are not indigenous to Hokkaido. The only factually known indigenous people of Hokkaido as well as the whole of the Japanese archipelago is the Jomon, as far as current evidence is considered. The Jomon lived in Hokkaido centuries before the Ainu existed.
Recent DNA studies have found that the Ainu in the Edo era was already an admixture of Jomon, Okhotsk and about 30% mainland Japanese.
I also noticed that Western scholars usually get very defensive when we show them evidence that their narrative of Ainu being the indigenous victims of Japanese colonization is false.
Another despised minority, even though ethically the same as the majority group, is the burakumin, descendants of trades deemed untouchable like tanners.
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125 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
Hayden White's metahistorical perspectives on how "narratives" shape history were really eye opening for me.
It's too sad to think of the finality of culture, but this is the least I can do. I think it's great that some Ainu are relearning the language - it's such a strong cultural bond.
I'm white but I work with a Coast Salish language that the tribes are trying to bring back from extinction. Indian children were forced into boarding schools and beaten if they didn't speak English, so a generation grew up without learning and the last L1 speaker died a decade ago. So much was lost, but linguists and elders wrote down enough that revival is possible. It will take hard work and determination for entire tribes though, so it may never recover except in ceremonial usage.
Not every society has produced things of equal value, and it's not particularly offensive to notice that.
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writt...
> To restate Sima Qian’s experience in less emotional terms: because he was principled enough to contradict the emperor in the presence of his court, Sima Qian was sentenced to castration. This was a death sentence—any self-respecting man of his day would commit suicide before submitting to the procedure. Everyone expected Sima Qian to do so. But in the end Sima Qian decided to accept the punishment and live the rest of his life in shame, because if he did not he would never finish the history he had started.
> Not every historian has the balls to a challenge despot face-to-face. For despotic Wudi was—the castration of Sima Qian was hardly the most despotic thing Wudi would do before his reign ended. It is but one episode in a string of terrors, one paint-stroke in a portrait of tyranny.
> But who painted the portrait? None other than the grand historian Sima Qian. We remember Wudi as Sima Qian chose to depict him. Had Wudi realized the influence his court astronomer would have on future generations, he might have treated him differently. But Wudi realized none of this. Sima Qian was published brutally and embarrassed publicly. He was a loser.
> But in the end, the loser got his revenge.
It may be just survivorship bias, since all the "losers" that are really "lost" in history are nowhere to be found.
In the story of your reference, Wudi did not choose to destroy the work of Sima Qian, which he can do easily if he want to, and happened a lot in Chinese history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o....
Sima Qian may be just a lucky guy enough to get his work passed on and that's all.
See https://www.stand.ie/crofters-scotlands-indigenous-heritage/, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/crofters-..., http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is..., and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_is...
It seems like the Crofters are in the first group.
Oh, is e Albannach a tha annam, tha beagan Gaidhlig agam, ach chan eil mi fileanta ann.
I just checked Wikipedia and the Celts seem to have come from central Europe, so I guess they aren't the original inhabitants, but another wave of invaders.
If you go back far enough, you could probably consider Neanderthals to be victims of genocide. But there could have been an even earlier wave of settlement, so were they really indigenous?
The largely Angle/Saxon incursion was not a smooth considered invasion but more of a spreading out. Bear in mind that travelling by sea was generally easier than by land at the time. Heavily wooded hills are a pain to cross compared to sea with a decent wind. So the sea back then was not a barrier but actually helpful.
300?-1066 - What will become the UK etc is an amalgam of tiddly kingdoms and whatnot. What becomes England is Wessex, Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall - a bit Welsh - west wales), Kent, Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, Mercia, Deira and quite a lot more. There was the Danelaw and Dalegelt business with a bunch of homicidal viking folk. York's, and hence New York's names are derived from Jorvik which was the Danish name for the original town. The Romans called the place Eboracum.
Then the Normans turn up in 1066. lol
There is a step between Jorvik and the Latin Eboracum: Eoforvic.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picts
One example, large portion of words (~30%) are have either French roots, quite likely due to the Norman invasion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England
And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Britain
I believe there's a couple of Hardcore history episodes about the Roman invasions that are worth a listen.
Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end.
We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
The current majority culture is pretty new; about 1500 years (or maybe 1000, depending on what view you take on the Normans). There were a number of waves; before the Angles et al, the Romans, Celts, aforementioned bloody Beaker people, and various others. That’s for England; once you consider the rest of the UK it’s even messier.
This one's obvious; your tongue can't hold water the way a cat's does. Humans everywhere can cup water in their hands, but they suck it up rather than trying futilely to lick it up. I feel comfortable generalizing this into the past.
While it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, the UK's demographics trends indicate that you're wrong - it hasn't been a long while, it is now.
The UK doesn't talk much about its internal ethnic structure, but there are still traces of discrimination against people with the "wrong" accents.
The Troubles isn't usually called a war of colonialism, but it has the hallmarks: different languages and religious beliefs between groups which largely didn't intermarry? Long history of supremacy of one group over the other, including formally in law?
Ignoring Ireland for a moment, that is.
The history of all nations and peoples revolves around claiming land, and then fighting over it.
Even the act of founding a country carries many of the same sins as conquest or colonization. When a country is founded, a person or group of people decides that they are the ruler of everybody within some particular boundaries on the map. The only difference between that and conquest is whether or not those people had an established ruler.
> uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
History is not divided into victims and perpetrators in this respect, the only distinction you can make is that at any particular point in time any particular group may have been on the winning or losing end of it.
> colonialism has devastated cultures across the globe, and we should acknowledge that
To what end is it important to acknowledge this? The history of all people is drenched in the blood and atrocity of the past. Colonialism is not different from any other form of historic state or empire building.
> Let’s acknowledge that most modern Americans are not fans of slavery, the confederacy or racism. But is it right or useful to go back into history and cleanse the campus of references to those events and people who, in an earlier era with a different set of values, participated in them? So much is lost if we insist on this approach to history:
–Leaders are not perfect. In fact, the very qualities that may lead to huge success may also result in grand failures. Ask Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton or, yes, Woodrow Wilson. We’re better off celebrating and learning from leaders warts and all.
–History itself is full of failures and successes. Before the U.S., essentially every culture and country had slavery. Only in America was the prospect of eliminating it on the table at the founding, and eventually it was accomplished, Are we now to cleanse the public square of all failures?
——-
Generally, I think slavery and mass murder/subjugation are pretty awful, no matter the era, no matter if someone else is also doing it.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/12/01/prese...
> The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation for presentism in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_his...
Your comment goes beyond a typical ad hominem, you’re dismissing an argument simply because it has previously been used at least once by people you disagree with.
Presentism is a very specific kind of Eurocentrism founded on the teleological idea that, essentially, this is all God's plan and we're on the right side of it. Its meaning is changing a little in the modern era, now that we're looking back on our (human) history and recoiling. This naturally causes us some dissonance; the classic example is Jefferson's devotion to liberty... as a slaveholder who personally ordered his slaves flogged [2]. And classically, presentism would say that the US was on the correct course, and these other peoples (indigenous Americans, people we brought over to enslave, etc.) would inevitably lose out, because they're not on the right side of history [3].
But again in the modern era, we're seeing the meaning change from "we're on the right side of history and therefore can do no wrong" to "our values now are so different, if Andrew Jackson were alive today he'd be in prison". I think this is right; I don't want to erase Jefferson from history, but I do think I'd feel weird as an African-American to see slaveowners exalted everywhere (even money, save Lincoln and Grant everyone on there was a slaveowner). I mean, as a white guy I feel weird about it anyway.
But while I think the wiki article is pretty thinly cited, it does reference an opinion piece from the president of the American Historical Association which I actually really like. Here are some good bits:
> I'm not arguing that identity politics have no place in historical study; women's history, African American history, Latino history, gay and lesbian history, and the like have all made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of history. It is hard to imagine American history in this country without some element of national identity in it. And present-day concerns have helped revivify topics, such as imperialism, that needed reconsideration.
> Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline.
> Students readily absorb these attitudes of temporal superiority, but they also stand in some ways as our best bulwark against it. When I teach Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history to students in UCLA's history of history class, they at first seize upon his Eurocentric, indeed racist, comments about Africa's place in world history, but they quite readily see that their condescension toward Hegel derives from Hegel's own worldview. Hegel was the great codifier of Western temporal superiority; for Hegel, all truth is revealed through the progression of history, which means that those in the present always have a better shot at grasping truth than do people in the past. Students understand quite quickly that those who follow them will have the same retrospective advantage over them that they enjoy vis à vis Hegel.
So, specifically, I'm not dismissing your characterization of my comment as presentist (?) because it's got some new modern relevance. I'm dismissing it because I buy the moral relativism critique: I think these things (colonialism, here) were always bad, and I think your attempt to dismiss my characterization as presentism is applying mor...
Nearly every area in the globe was occupied by an earlier group before it was occupied by the present occupying group. Many areas had wave after wave of occupying group, some eliminating the previous group, some merging with the previous group. The people now "Greek" have little relationship to the ancient Greeks, the Mid East is mess, India has fabric of different groups, China was conquered by multiple waves of "barbarians", etc.
Many of these conquests and settlement processes have unspeakably cruel. European process stand out for being the largest and most recent but not necessarily otherwise. The cause for hope is that just hearing all this, most people want something better.
The Han suffer from altitude-related health problems and die at much, much higher rates than the Tibetans.
It seemed a little weird that China would want to “settle” Tibet considering that the most economically prosperous regions of the Country are on the Coastal regions. What are the incentives to abandon your home and move to a strange land?
2. Nationalistic pride. A lot of modern China's identity is tied up with using the perceived territories of the old Qing empire as a baseline measure for the country's standing in the world. Tibet was part of the Qing empire (disregarding how pre-modern empires controlled territory in arrangements that gave local rulers much more leeway than modern nations) so not having Tibet as part of modern China would be seen as a major defeat. Try asking a Chinese national to explain why the PRC fought to keep Tibet but not Mongolia despite both being part of the old Qing empire and watch the mental gymnastics.
The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
You're just asking for Tibet to revolt at that point. Obviously you know this, but longstanding imperial Chinese policy was that no official was ever allowed to administer his own home province. There was good reason for that.
> The reasons for each individual migrant choosing to go to Tibet instead of staying in their home provinces are more likely to be economic: better-paying jobs in tourism, mining, hydropower, ...
Some of them are just assigned as settlers by the government. I don't know how significant the phenomenon is, but e.g. a friend of mine told me that her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
The PRC requires that "The chairman of an autonomous region, the prefect of an autonomous prefecture or the head of an autonomous county shall be a citizen of the nationality exercising regional autonomy in the area concerned." http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/...
I'm not sure whether subdivisions in an autonomous area are automatically autonomous as well, but if so, that would require local Tibetan governments at all administrative levels to be lead by Tibetans.
That doesn't mean they can't use the old tactic of promoting officials across regional borders to prevent individuals from building up their own little kingdoms. E.g. the current chairman of Tibet is a Tibetan from Yunnan, so technically he isn't ruling his home province. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Dalha
> her father had been in the army, and upon leaving he was settled in Xinjiang.
How does settlement work in that case? Did they give him a plot of land to farm or a job at a SOE or did they simply order him to stay in Xinjiang and find some way to make a living there?
If you're interested in the issue, the term of art is "China proper". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_proper
I asked someone once what the point of China owning Xinjiang was. He responded "we don't want them to attack us".
For Tibet, I agree with magicsmoke that it is incredibly significant as the source of both of China's rivers. I can't imagine China willingly ceding control over those.
The funniest pattern you can see in news - everyone talks about the other, while ignoring their own mess. Chinese media will bring up Native Americans while American media will bring up Tibet or Honk Kong or Taiwan. Middle East Muslims will complain about Palestine while conveniently ignoring Assyrians.
Are you suggesting that native american genocide isn't a hot topic in America?
The language of modern Greeks is directly descended from that of the ancients. From classical times through the hellenistic period, the Byzantine Empire up to today there is a continuity of culture.
Molecular anthropology gainsays this statement.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-hav...
I don’t believe this is true, FWIW. If I’m not mistaken, most of the Mediterranean as had relatively little genetic replacement since the Indo-Europeans first stablished themselves. There has been cultural turnover in the Middle East, but this has mostly taken the form of elites engaging in tax farming conquered populations, rather than genocide and replacement.
Being a black person in snow would attract predators and they would die so people with lighter skins who could camouflage easily in the background would survive.
All the areas you're quoting have changed very little since the Bronze Age.
The fact the imperial power belonged to foreign dynasties (mainly the Yuan and the Qing) doesn’t mean the people itself and its culture was erased. Actually in case of Manchu the reverse happened with the ruling elite taking Chinese culture while forgetting it’s own culture.
It's also the case that indigenous people killed each other off. For example, the Māori genocided the pacifist Moriori and the Comanche came very close to doing so with the Apache.
Depending on how you define "country" the Pitcairn Islands are an exception:
> The earliest known settlers of the Pitcairn Islands were Polynesians who appear to have lived on Pitcairn and Henderson, and on Mangareva Island 540 kilometres (340 mi) to the northwest, for several centuries. They traded goods and formed social ties among the three islands despite the long canoe voyages between them, which helped the small populations on each island survive despite their limited resources. Eventually, important natural resources were exhausted, inter-island trade broke down and a period of civil war began on Mangareva, causing the small human populations on Henderson and Pitcairn to be cut off and eventually become extinct.
> Although archaeologists believe that Polynesians were living on Pitcairn as late as the 15th century,[citation needed] the islands were uninhabited when they were rediscovered by Europeans.
The Polynesians were there, but they died off before the Europeans came.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands
And in most cases every "indigenous people" have actually replaced other indigenous people that were there before but for which we have no recorded history.
The more common accepted theory according to recent DNA studies is that the Ainu are actually Siberians who mixed with Jomon and also mainland Japanese.
Saying that the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido is a common misconception of Western scholars, they somehow insist in this historical error.
> Having treated the bear well in life, her people believe the spirit of the sacred animal, which they worship as a deity, will ensure the continued good fortune of their community.
That's... so interesting
Indigenous or not, humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us. I hope this is going to be one of those inconceivable mentalities which they will point to with curiosity and sadness.
This is a uniquely human trait.
And judging by the number of people here who disagree with me, our shabby human race has a long way to go before we reach any semblance of 'civilization'.
Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable.
Agreed though that nature is anything but 'nice'. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been lucky enough to be almost entirely shielded from nature by human society.
Where is our consciousness, self-awareness? The invention of religion - as the ultimate moral or ethical framework - is exposed as a fraud. That's several millennia of philosophy up in flames.
So I maintain that we should hold humans to a higher standard - the one that we believe we're entitled to, but seldom live up to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_period
It’s supposedly more complicated since Yamato people are partly descended from Jomon who are supposedly also one of the ancestral groups of the Ainu. Both are indigenous and have been for over 1500 years. Or perhaps more accurately, the invasion started over 2000 years ago and was complete a few hundred years ago. Seems somewhat similar to Okinawa.
It’s like a technologically more advanced people subjugating their cousins.
Not unsurprisingly the biggest two, the Ainu and the remaining Japanese civilization, seem to correspond to the two biggest islands.
This suggests to me that the Ainu while maybe sharing some ancestry with the dominant Yamato people have a very different history, with the Ainu probably sharing less genetic history with modern East Asians.
But this peopling was a good 2000+ years ago. So it’s a bit like saying my ancestors were here 13000 years ago and most of yours were here only 2000 years ago.
Furthermore, we have no idea how many waves of people have migrated to those islands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15440125 from 2017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19711756 from last year
Some claims state that the Emishi and Ainu are related, but this is debated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emishi
https://www.genetics.org/content/202/1/261
I came into the series for the educational part, but stayed for the crazy jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ3RteagLoY
1. A relatively recent (past ~20k years) migration from Central Siberia correlated with the Ancestral North Eurasians [1], who contributed significant ancestry to Amerindians, Europeans, and Central/South Asians. They were phenotypically intermediate between modern East and West Eurasians, hence the unique combination of features often found in Amerindians.
2. A remnant of a much earlier (~50k years) population descended from humans who took the Southern Route [2] across Eurasia. They contributed significant ancestry to the Australian Aboriginals, certain South and Southeast Asian populations, and potentially some groups in the Amazon. The ancestry contributed to those Amerindians in the Amazon would've had to come from this population coming up across East Eurasia, where they could've left behind (or contributed to) populations like the Ainu.
West Eurasians (Caucasoids) and South Eurasians (Australoids) share a few distinctive traits that are shared by the Ainu, notably prominent brow ridges, lack of epicanthic folds, and heavier facial hair. So purely from a phenotypic point of view it's difficult to determine their origin. Genomic analyses also tend to be inconclusive, with Ainu often clustering with other Siberian groups rather than some special outgroup.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Eurasian
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Dispersal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalash_people
This isn't phrenology in the racist and pseudoscientific sense at all. It's not even trying to correlate anthropometrics. The Ainu are actually a distinct people, and noticing the readily apparent distinctions between the Ainu people and the other inhabitants of the Japanese islands is no more racist than noting that African peoples tend to have darker skin than Europeans. Erasing distinctions rather than recording them does nothing more than making it easier to erase genocide from the historical record.
[1] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.237533/page/n8...
[2] https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.31614/2015.3161...
[3] https://archive.org/stream/cu31924013977727#page/n209/mode/2...
[4] http://gally.net/jatsi/about/sources.html
In Search of Japanese Roots https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/in-search-of-j...
https://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/aft/
Marimo is an extremely odd moss ball that only grows in their lake [2]. Once to the brink of extinction, the Ainu celebrates every year by strolling around the city with the prettiest marimo. They celebrate through the night with traditional dances. It was a unique experience.
[1] https://ohmatsuri.com/en/articles/hokkaido-marimo-matsuri
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marimo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
* was the elder brother of the polish national hero jozef pilsudski
* conspired to assasinate russian tsar together with the brother of vladimir lenin
* was sentenced to death, then sent to 15 years of hard labour on sakhalin island
* married ainu woman, they had 2 children
* studied the ainu language, culture, etc, created the dictionary and recorded 100 wax cylinder of the ainu native speakers
* fled to japan when russo-japanese war broke out, where he was trying to help ainu cause too
* returned to poland and studied ethnography of peoples of polish mountains
* fled to france at the beginning of ww1 and was found drowned in seine river
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Pi%C5%82sudski
If my memory serves me, he's also mentioned in Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast.
The Ainu are not indigenous to Hokkaido. The only factually known indigenous people of Hokkaido as well as the whole of the Japanese archipelago is the Jomon, as far as current evidence is considered. The Jomon lived in Hokkaido centuries before the Ainu existed.
Recent DNA studies have found that the Ainu in the Edo era was already an admixture of Jomon, Okhotsk and about 30% mainland Japanese.
I also noticed that Western scholars usually get very defensive when we show them evidence that their narrative of Ainu being the indigenous victims of Japanese colonization is false.