Neolithic Europeans Were Old School Thugs

[grumbler]

Only Rousseauan silly people think ancient people were peace loving hippies. Being a peace loving hippy requires modern technology...ironically I guess.

That does not mean the article is not full of crackpottery. It is all over the place. I kept having that 'WTF am I reading?' feeling.

Yeah, and he's got a lot of wrong ideas, like his contention that aristocratic women in Republican Rome had a lot of power.

[dps]

I got to where discussing theories about ancient Europeans digressed into an irrelevant contrasting of Japanese and Chinese cultures,  At that point I figured that the article didn't have any real focus and gave up.

[Valmy]

I got to where discussing theories about ancient Europeans digressed into an irrelevant contrasting of Japanese and Chinese cultures,  At that point I figured that the article didn't have any real focus and gave up.

That was pretty much how it went. Just one random thought after the next.

[Malthus]

That article reads like a smorgasboard of crackpottery. 

Examples?

I found the thesis (that Europeans were never peace-loving hippies until possibly today) rather self-evident and am surprised it's controversial.

It isn't. No-one in the archaeology field, as far as i know, believes that pre-historic Europeans were peace-loving hippies.

Rather, I'm referring to the article randomly jumping from one quite irrelevant topic to the next, as if they all related to some sort of significant point.

In four paragraphs he goes from Tolkien ("In J. R. R. Tolkien's work there are allusions to the coming Fourth Age of Middle Earth, an age of men"), to  some sort of pseudo-feminist, pseudo-"seduction community" analysis of biological determinism ("... village life became an inevitable target of extraction from collective groups of males, who translated their significant superior upper body strength into a reign of coercive terror. That coercion was translated into reproductive success"), to mutation theory, to Issac Newton's liking for magic, to comparing Judiasm to Christianity.

It's like watching that Time-Cube guy muse on anthropology. 

[Legbiter]

[Razgovory]

That article reads like a smorgasboard of crackpottery. 

Examples?

I found the thesis (that Europeans were never peace-loving hippies until possibly today) rather self-evident and am surprised it's controversial.

It isn't. No-one in the archaeology field, as far as i know, believes that pre-historic Europeans were peace-loving hippies.

Rather, I'm referring to the article randomly jumping from one quite irrelevant topic to the next, as if they all related to some sort of significant point.

In four paragraphs he goes from Tolkien ("In J. R. R. Tolkien's work there are allusions to the coming Fourth Age of Middle Earth, an age of men"), to  some sort of pseudo-feminist, pseudo-"seduction community" analysis of biological determinism ("... village life became an inevitable target of extraction from collective groups of males, who translated their significant superior upper body strength into a reign of coercive terror. That coercion was translated into reproductive success"), to mutation theory, to Issac Newton's liking for magic, to comparing Judiasm to Christianity.

It's like watching that Time-Cube guy muse on anthropology.

Well I gave up after the first paragraph after there were some red flags, but maybe I'll read the whole thing.

[Razgovory]

What the hell is UNZ?

Don't know, don't care. The author is a well know genomics blogger who has worked for the New York Times and Discovery in the past.

You neglected to mention that he was fired from the New York Times for his affiliations with far right racists publications.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/03/new-york-times-drops-razib-khan-204287.html

[MadImmortalMan]

That article reads like a smorgasboard of crackpottery. 

Examples?

I found the thesis (that Europeans were never peace-loving hippies until possibly today) rather self-evident and am surprised it's controversial.

It isn't. No-one in the archaeology field, as far as i know, believes that pre-historic Europeans were peace-loving hippies.

Rather, I'm referring to the article randomly jumping from one quite irrelevant topic to the next, as if they all related to some sort of significant point.

In four paragraphs he goes from Tolkien ("In J. R. R. Tolkien's work there are allusions to the coming Fourth Age of Middle Earth, an age of men"), to  some sort of pseudo-feminist, pseudo-"seduction community" analysis of biological determinism ("... village life became an inevitable target of extraction from collective groups of males, who translated their significant superior upper body strength into a reign of coercive terror. That coercion was translated into reproductive success"), to mutation theory, to Issac Newton's liking for magic, to comparing Judiasm to Christianity.

It's like watching that Time-Cube guy muse on anthropology.

They are attempts at injecting internet snark. He does it in a quasi-Family Guy literary format of constant cutaways. It's a bit hard to read as a result.