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Re: maize in ancient India: transpacific links (cont.)



yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>CARL JOHANNESSEN ON ANCIENT INDIAN MAIZE
>
>[part 2 of 2]
>
>Of course, information about this interesting ancient Indian (and
>Chinese) corn has been around for a while (detailed bibliography is
>given in the article). J. Needham wrote about this in his TRANS-PACIFIC
>CONTACTS. But hard studies about this were quite scarce until this
>publication in ECONOMIC BOTANY. 
<snip> 

>This alone, to me, is a strong indication of antiquity. It is a matter
>well-known to anthropologists that the higher one goes into the
>mountain areas, the more ancient and the more indigenous the tribes
>residing there are. Usually, invading tribes throughout history come
>in from the plains and push the previous residents (the more
>indigenous peoples) to less fertile areas at higher elevations.
>(Alternately, they can be pushed further into the jungle areas.) In
>turn, the previous arrivals to this general area push the even more
>indigenous people ever higher up into the hills. This sort of a
>process was, and of course still is, quite common around the world.
>(The destruction of native cultures is occurring at a very high rate
>currently.)
> 

   I'm not even going to touch this one...."more indigenous"?? You either 
is, or you ain't!! Also, this hypothesis of conquest-and-retreat is not 
the norm



<snip>
>Who is minimizing what here? I, for one, _know_ how creative and talented
>the ancient Americans were, and how much they have accomplished. The
>diffusionists that I read only wish to describe the particulars of
>cultural evolution objectively -- the way it was in reality. That reality
>clearly included cultural interaction across the Pacific that went _both
>ways_, starting from a very early date. To pretend that good evidence for
>this does not exist, to close one's eyes to all this, is to choose to
>live in a world of delusion, it seems to me... 
>

   So, are you saying that maize came FROM the Americas?? And are you 
admitting that the native peoples of the Americas did indeed have the 
ability to creat their own civilizations and cultivate crops unknown in 
the Old World?? To date, you have stood foursquare in opposition to any 
suggestion that anything of importance came from the New World, or even 
occured there without Polynesian/Chinese/Japanese, or Old World group _du 
jour_ to bring it here. Quite a switch.

-- 
_______________
Randal Allison, Ph.D.
http://cis.tamu.edu/~ralliso
   --If you can't be happy naturally, be unnaturally happy.



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