Re: Scientists zero in on timing, causes of ice age mammal extinctions in southern California

Not the kind of hunting that people glorify, but it provides food and hides.

Or barbarism.

The reason is obvious enough - it excused barbaric behaviour by the people stealing their territories.

They parked their butts in Australia some 60,000 years ago. The point about the book is that it documents indigenous cultivation technique's observed by the first explorers and ignored by subsequent descriptions.

There does seem to have been children's version - it wasn't the one I bought and was available when I bought my copy and I wasn't aware of it. There was a certain amount of public discussion about the book when I bought it, and it was taken seriously.

Aborigines do use fuel reduction burns to minimise the risk of wild-fires, and our professional fire-fighters have taken to copying their approach - they've been doing it for rather longer than we have.

I grew up in Tasmania where the aboriginal population declined drastically from the start of colonisation in 1803 until the last recognised full-blooded Tasmanian aborigine had died around 1905. It was widely felt that some of them had made sure that they weren't officially recognised, and had contrived to survive.

Imported infectious diseases probably killed more of them than massacres, but messing up their food gathering would have lead to widespread starvation, and made them more vulnerable to disease.

And you don't? The people who look at that period of Australian history do get reliably horrified by what went on. My youngest brother studied medicine and got involved in Aboriginal health after he graduated, and isn't all that impressed by the health care they get now (though he does what he can for his patients). Their life expectancies are about a decade shorter than the population average.

Not so you'd notice. They mostly ignore it.

Rural Australians get poorer health care than urban Australians, and poor Australians get poorer health care than rich Australians. Aboriginal Australians don't take theior docotorsas seriously as the rest of the population, and ignore their advice even more enthusiastically.

It's essentially a sociological problem, as my little brother will tell you at length if you give him half a chance. He started a Ph.D. on the subject having got himself into a place where he could get good data on the subject, but found that his data was uniquely good and needed special statistical techniques to do it justice and he got stalled on the process of getting his hands on them.

My cousin the statistician might have been able help, but he worked for CSIRO and his services weren't free,

They aren't. The Maori were Neolithic rather than Paleolithic, and famously stole a bunch of British cannon during the colonial invasion and used them on the British with such effect that they ended up with a negotiated peace treaty. The Australian aborigines never did that well.

But not as many as the Australian aborigines. The Polynesian languages seems to come from Taiwan.

Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals get 3% to 6% of their DNA from Denisovans, which makes their genomes detectably different from Europeans. Polynesians have rather less - about 3%.

Not as ridiculous as Americans with a slave-owning heritage telling other people how they should treat their minority populations. The American Indian populations doesn't do that well in modern USA.

So what. And I was talking about Denisovian genetic segments, which you and haven't got, as opposed to the Neanderthal genetic segments which we do have.

But powerful and influential ones did, with Thomas Jefferson being the poster-boy.

But you can't quote statistics. Many Australian aborigines are thorougly assimilated into Australian society - though not quite a thoroughly as one would like. Stan Grant was a well-known TV journalist until some racist clown posted enough offensive nonsense to get him to take a job with less public exposure.

Back when I was a graduate student Charles Perkns became the first Australian aborigine to graduate from an Australian University, and I knew about it at the time. There have been quite a few more since then. Their first Ph.D. (in 1980) didn't generate the same interest - but Perkins was also very good at soccer and that matters in Australia.