Re: Stephen J. Gould and anthropological fraud

From: DesertCactus (desertcactus_at_emailcorner.net)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: 6 Jul 2004 04:45:48 -0700

>
> Because it was - like the Amazon is sparcely populated. Tribes even living
> 10 miles away from another tribe, had NO knowledge there was anyone else
> there, the language was completely different, etc. They were highly
> isolated, sparcely populated. People living like that do not HAVE to
> develop any kind of more advanced technologies to feed a lot of people and
> etc. China is OMG - man, what are they 1/3 of the world? DENSELY populated
> people. Always were. When the whites came to the USA they also saw "not
> many people here - a lot of open land." Why do you suppose the NA were
> sparcely populated and not packed in like the Chinese? Because they WERE.

Yes as I said and as we seem to agree, limited by inability to get
more food. If all things were equal you'd expect Africa to be the most
populous place in the world if for no other reason that the fact that
people have been there for the longest. Humans are thought to have
orginiated in Africa of course and then spread to the rest of the
world.

The Native Americans were probably had a small population for similiar
reasons? They also immigrated into the USA so I don't know how long
they have been there.

> You probably have better theories than me, but I'd assert
> > that the population was LIMITED by inability to get food, if most of
> > the africans were tribes like the Zulu's they would have got food from
> > what limited animals they could hunt and edible plants. Their
> > population would have been in equalibrium with their surroundings,
> > neither one threatening the other.
>
> Yes, they did live in harmony - the whites that first found them said that
> too. When humans live in harmony with land, they tend to be quite sparcely
> populated! Life was not hard for them at all there in that tropical land.
> Only a FEW tribes, like the Zulu, were warlike.
> >
> > There is more than enough arable land and sources of food in africa to
> > feed huge amounts of people if farmed properly,
>
> That's white man's thinking for ya. Right away, change the land, farm it
> (that causes a whole HEAP of problems that cascade into more problems -
> eventually OVER POPULATION problems - which is what you see NOW in Africa).
> Exactly like what you are saying; that's what white men said when they saw
> the place. That's not what the Africans did, they never did it. Neither
> did the Amazonian Indians - which you CAN find out about - very sparcely
> populated.
>
> but they still have
> > problems with this suffering occasional famines, I believe it was
> > Zambia that was inviting the white farmers from Zimbabwe(that had
> > their land seized and given to black zimbabwians) to come to Zambia to
> > farm there because the Zambia's wanted their proffessionalism.
>
> That's all recent. I'm speaking about PRE PRE COLONIAL TIMES, when the first
> white men SAW Africans. They wrote in detail about what they saw - just as
> they wrote about what they saw in North America. Try thinking outside that
> paradigm. Africans didn't even have WHEELS, man.

Of course not as you said neccesity is the mother of invention, why
did they need them?, as you say they didn't have to move a very long
distance. Wheels were used first for transporting things over a long
distance? Africans wouldn't have had many things that couldn't be
carried fairly easily and wouldn't have needed to transpot them very
far anyway.

> > Whereas in china, they would have had mass-farming and been able to
> > get huge amounts of food easily, food wouldn't limit the population.
>
> Different strategy for people living in that climate for a VERY long time.
> Africa is not China.

> >
> > But you can look at africa now, and look at how the population is
> > growing, despite disease such as AIDS, war, famine and other
> > difficulties. Ruston's theories are not destroyed by comparison to
> > China or other countries are they?
>
> Yes, they are. Rushton's theories fail because he is not doing what a real
> hard-scientists would do - and that would be to really LOOK at the Africans
> BEFORE contact with anyone white changed things. And then LOOK at the
> Chinese the same way. China was always DENSELY populated. Africa was NEVER
> densely populated - as I said, 10 miles away, a tribe living in one area
> forever, NEVER even ventured 10 freaking miles away to KNOW there were other
> tribes out there. That is what MOST of the place was like. No wheels.
> NOTHING like that. PRIMITIVE. I don't mean "primitive" in any negative
> way, either. Whites should have NEVER done anything there. NEVER. They
> should have left the place alone.

I couldn't agree more. They shouldn't have come and tried to impose a
Western system of civizilation on the africans. They should have been
allowed to develop their own system of civilization, people in
neolithic europe were living in similar conditions to the Africans a
few hundred years ago, although not quite as primitive I don't think.

>
> Poor compared to what? No one in China is poor today!

I don't know about that. You probably know more about it than me.

> > Africa is the poorest place in the world,
>
> Again, what do you define as poor?
Currently it is the poorest place in the world by the measurements of
wealth that are applied to all countries, GDP or whatever, literacy,
amd pretty much every measurement like that.

>Before whites ever got there, the people
> lived rich and fulfilling lives - and poor/rich were NOT determined along
> the lines you think of them AT ALL.

Heh, perhaps. It depends whether you think living as a tribesman is a
rich and fufilling life. Certainly a lot of the suffering people in
theses failed states are not having enjoyable lives, suffering from
poverty, disease, warfare etc.

There are many tribes still existent in africa living pretty much as
they always have. One hears of them abducting people and canablising
them.

>
> > 20% of whites and 33% of blacks are below the poverty line in the USA.
> > Europe's population is declining as is Russia's.
>
> Yup, I know about that and I define the poverty line in ways a lot more in
> line with reality of daily life - which means RAISE UP THOSE NUMBERS!. And
> well, heh, it's funny because the whites are the ones that MESSED WITH
> Africans when they should have kept their damned selves HOME and stayed out
> of there. Seems to me that they bonded their fate to that place and those
> people. That's how it seems to me on some esoteric level. They entangled
> themselves with the black race. Asians DID NOT. They knew better.

Well it was the time of empires. They aquired much wealth from their
african colonies and slaves. In the long-term it probably wasn't worth
it. The fact that asian's did not colonise africa was probably because
of the distance between africa and asia. I do know that the Chinese
did visit Africa and took back a small number of slaves though.

> > the space of a relatively short time, say 100 years a
> > population of an area can decrease or increase massively.

And about the above which I wrote. I'm not sure when the first
Europeans first visited Africa and noticed the sparsely populated
africans but it wasn't that long ago. And now the population is 500
million or so? Populations can increase or dicrease massively in a
relatively short space of time.

> Get rid of it! Get Zone Alarm - or if you have windows XP, just use that
> firewall - it's pretty good. I never heard of a firewall blocking out
> medical terms.

I'll look into it, thanks.

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