“I am not so sure that megafauna extinctions are well correlated with human arrival and hunting”

Then I suggest that instead of repeatedly citing Meltzer like he’s the last word on the subject, you take a look at this, for example: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12150.short In particular, I suggest you note the last sentence of the abstract and how that relates to what Greg said about islands and what I said about dating, instead of making cracks about his panties. I happen to know he doesn’t wear them.

I only mentioned the citation because it seems like the sort of study that might interest you and I seem to recall you mentioning somewhere that you didn’t have institutional access to some journal databases. I was simply offering to send it, in case you were interested and didn’t already have it.

I never asserted anything about climate; someone else did after reading my admittedly tangential comment. If I recall, Meltzer doesn’t argue the issue one way or another (and neither do I); he just points out that the American megafauna extinction dates are sparse and spread out over several thousands of years, so correlating them with Amerindian hunting is difficult (or “complex”). I have read similar things about Australia, which is why I mentioned it.

In any event, I hope this clears things up and all is now well.

if you are going to throw around citations, it would be nice if you fleshed out your assessment. it is trivially easy to find an unrepresentative citation (though the one you gave isn’t really). that’s why i prodded you to be more clear in what you were getting at, instead of making vague assertions of complexity. i really don’t care if it’s complex, i’m curious as to why you think that the climate change hypothesis is so plausible. if you don’t care to spend your time explaining, that’s fine, but i’d rather not have discussion off on the tangent anyway.

As for assertions in my blog, it is of course a testing ground of sorts (and place for provocation) and if you’d like to come for some problematizing, you are most welcome.

Thanks Gisele.

don’t be an asshole about it yourself. and saying “Nearly all complex events, such as megafauna extinctions, have multi-causal explanations” is kind of a bullshit response, like wondering about sample size when you have nothing else to wonder about. it’s fine if you find the climate explanations plausible. i didn’t engage because your presuppositions have to be really different to even find this plausible IMO. and on your own blog you make plenty of clear and crisp assertions about human history which are easily problematized,* so i’m kind of skeptical of your “jeez, everything is so complex, let’s wait up” stance.

* i actually disagree with a lot of your assertions, but my own views are so uncertain that i don’t think it’s useful to get into arguments when we have to work back to first assumptions.

Australian Aborigines have affinities with New Guineans but they also have mtDNA haplogroups which are not shared with them.

At least one Tasmanian mtDNA sequence (Presser et al. 2002) would be classified as haplogroup S which belongs to the N group of haplogroups (like the ‘O’ sequence of the Australian from the recent study).

In terms of sample diversity, the key break should be not Tasmania and continental Australia, but North Central coast v. interior populations (particularly towards the SW).

Also, the evidence tends to contradict strongly #8 or the reverse, settlement of Papua New Guinea from Australia. While Papuans and Australian Aborigines are an outgroup relative to other Asian populations the genetics suggests a shared common origin rather than one being a source for the other. Phylogenetically, the two populations are similar in age but substantially disjoint. They have unconnected branches of multiple phylogenetic lineage trees. The basal lineages that would connnect Papuans and Aborigines are pretty much absent from either population. There is also really not evidence of measurable admixture between the two populations post-45 kya.