Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedEd Barnhart: prediction
30 Sept 2024 Lex Fridman Podcast #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
“Now, this is just mostly guess, I’ll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ed Barnhart
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 30 Sept 2024
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Do you think it was a gradual process? If it’s like 30,000 to 60,000 years ago, was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like one explorer that pushed the tribe to just go, go, go, go, and go maybe across 100 years travel all the way across maybe into North America, where Canada is now, and then big leaps in movement versus gradual movement? I think it was big leaps. Now, this is just mostly guess, I’ll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go, and there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America, the ones that got separated early and didn’t mix their DNA, like the people in the Amazon. Most of those guys have O-blood type and they’re haplogroup D, which is the oldest one that entered the U.S. And what are they doing down there? I do believe they came across the Bering Strait. We have no real evidence to say they came in mass across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast all the way to South America. So there’s some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened like tens of thousands of years ago, but in a very rapid pace. There’s these explorers. They went all the way to South America and there established their more stable existence. And from there, South America, Mesoamerica, North America was gradually expanded into that area?…
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