Science
Related: About this forumRethinking Easter Island’s Collapse
Another crack in the dyke of Jared Diamond's grand thesis on societal collapse? I've never read Guns, Germs, and Steel but from what I understand from smart anthropologist friends, it has multiple problems. Looks like it has one more.
Full post: http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2012/02/01/rethinking-easter-islands-collapse
salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)Turns out the dyke of the authors of this new paper may have enough cracks be fatally flawed. See this letter in Current World Archaeology that a commenter posted at the Mad Biologist's site: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marklynas.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F09%2FBahn-flenley-CWA.pdf
tabatha
(18,795 posts)mahina
(17,656 posts)Chile is really oppressing the people terribly. Our John Osorio introduces Rapa Nui activist and artist Santi Hirorangi at Moana Nui 2011 here in Honolulu recently http://moananui2011.org/?page_id=745
Cool to hear the spoken language and understand it, as it is so close to Hawaiian. I hope to go one day.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)In fact, the evidence shows that there wasn't any mass starvation, people just slowly left, returning to Iceland, and the population dwindled.
salvorhardin
(9,995 posts)I tried, but it was just so deathly dull. I do remember the blog wars over it in 2005 though. Here's an overview post from that time: http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/blogs/guns_germs_debates_2005.html
A similar flap erupted over Collapse too.
Igel
(35,309 posts)It actually made arguments which, if not conclusive, certainly point out plausible contributors to civilizations' rise and demise.
GGS, of course, ignored a lot of things and pretended to greater authority than it could have. A failing, but a common one--and forgivable in popular literature that is at least part-advocacy.
"Collapse" was pathetic. Couldn't read it. Had nothing better to do and found myself examining the floor in minute detail after about 10 pages. Then I'd focus, and 20 minutes later realize I was again examining the floor in minute detai. Or my socks. Or shoes.
The problem with "Collapse" is that it too narrowly tried to claim exclusive causes for civilizational collapse, and those causes were fairly few in number. It also ignored a fair number of really obvious causes, some of which were probably dominant in some of the "case studies." A little advocacy isn't a bad thing (not a good thing in every case, by any means); too much advocacy is always a bad thing.