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Expect to see more archaeology findings around the area of North or North West of Saudi Arabia. This area has been an archeology blindspots until 1980s [1].

Fun facts, the green pastures of Arabian Peninsula in ancient times has been mentioned in a well known authentic hadith (saying of Muhammad), "The Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers”[2].

[1]http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3224/1/1.pdf

[2]https://sunnah.com/muslim/12/76

2 comments

The evidence for multiple waves of human migration out of Africa is looking more and more likely.

It’s been ignored primarily due to the political, philosophical, perhaps even meta philosophical reasons. As the implication is that significant genomic differences existed within and between the early human populations. And so whether all of them qualify as “human”.

The same reason why it took so long for some people to have significant Neanderthal ancestry to become accepted fact. The average percentage of Neanderthal ancestry seems to increase as you move eastwards to East Asia.

> The same reason why it took so long for some people to have significant Neanderthal ancestry to become accepted fact.

This is mostly because for several decades the term Neanderthal in pop culture has been used to describe someone who is brutish or dumb.

Many people want to believe that they are descended from or fashioned by the god(s) or godlike idealized humans, not from some people who trudged through a swamp and sheltered in a rock outcropping.

And now with the realization that people of Eurasian ancestry carry Neanderthal genes, you're already starting to see the same fallacy emerge in the opposite direction , where people are starting to use Neanderthal ancestry as a badge of superiority over those without it like the people of Sub-Saharan Africa.

I recently read that the prior estimations for Neanderthal ancestry are off because they used comparative models that assumed that certain populations had no Neanderthal DNA. Newer techniques seem to indicate that almost all modern humans are partially descended from Neanderthals, including Africans.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/africa/africa-neanderthal-dna...

Interestingly, this is said to be a piece of the puzzle of whatever new model replaces the Out Of Africa one.

This type of information is actively suppressed and speaking about is shamed

I’ve never heard about this being an problem. Can you point to some discussion of this topic?

Bring it up at work and see how well that goes. Also I can’t really point to discussion on it, almost all of it is deleted on platforms like Reddit

I mean, seems like a weird thing to discuss at work? Also this feels like concern trolling. You can have whatever discussion you want about the potential for there having been multiple waves of human migration out of Africa. Do it respectfully and without weird racist undertones and things will work out fine.

It depends on the environment. We had two "social crisis" like this in my workplace. One was a triggered by an innocent remark about someone not seeing the wage gap between women and men in his personal circle and then mentioning there are too many variables to say a wage gap exist.

The person got massively and publicly shut down by leaders in the company who wrote lengthy messages about it and explained holding this belief wasn't acceptable in this company and rationalised the reaction with other leaders saying it was a way to send a message. They didn't manage to get the guy fired (but they tried!) and he left after a few months of radio silence.

Sure thing, nobody else dared to say something about it but the victim got messages of support by tons of people afraid to speak up.

My opinion is that, given it's a company's private space, the company could limit freedom of speech and ban public political discussion to avoid this scenario - still, seeing people trying to force their dogma on other people was shocking.

Think as you like, but behave like others.

https://medium.com/@alexanderemmanual/law-38-think-as-you-li...

Laws put in place by the political left open companies that don't shut down this kind of speech to sex and race discrimination lawsuits.

The utterances of these kinds of statements within a workplace can be used by a lawyer to paint the corporate culture as one that is sexist/racist/etc.

After Google fired the engineer, Damore, for his statements criticizing the discriminatory nature of affirmative action, and potential biological differences being the cause of the disparity between the number of men and women in computer science and engineering, the company actually received open letters from leading Democrats demanding that such an event never transpire again.

It's approaching something like a state ideology, with billions of dollars at stake in its tenets being upheld and not questioned.

The problem is people trying to draw conclusions from the bare facts that said bare facts do not support. That tends to be the aim of "bringing it up," and people are right to shame this anti-scientific behavior.

So now you see even on hackernews, discussion of black history is discouraged. I tried to bring it up, and all I got was downvotes and flags. This is outrageous.

> Expect to see more archaeology findings around the area of North or North West of Saudi Arabia. This area has been an archeology blindspots until 1980s.

Why did it open up for research? A change in leadership or just new deals opening because of money?

North-North West is where they're trying to focus their efforts in tourism, and also building that new city, since everyone knows the Bedouins in Riyadh are rather cultureless historically compared to the the Hejaz. Hence it's a bit of both, new leadership focusing on previously ignored parts and also trying to build up a tourism industry (for a rather bland place historically, since all of the history in the area is concentrated in the Holy Cities which are not open to non-Muslims).