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Pat Inverted Vibe Curve Blanchfield
@patblanchfield.bsky.social
US culture, violence, politics, psychoanalysis. associate faculty at the brooklyn institute of social research ordinary unhappiness (podcast, weekly) | apocalypse vibe check (substack) 2 niche 2 live 2 on brand 2 die
3.2k followers113 following573 posts
PIpatblanchfield.bsky.social

do you ever find yourself reading something fairly tedious and dry but then suddenly hit a passage that makes you think that you somehow might be totally fucking stoned

A text screenshot from Kaushik Roy’s Global History of Premodern Warfare that reads: “Humans reached New Guinea and Australia about 35,000 years ago and soon killed the megafauna. This megafauna included giant kangaroos, rhino-like marsupials called diprotodonts, ostrich-like flightless birds, each weighing 181 kilos, and big reptiles like a one-ton lizard, land-dwelling crocodiles, etc. Diamond speculates that the giant mammals of Australia and New Guinea died but the big mammals of Africa and Eurasia survived into modern times because the later had coevolved with proto-humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Hence, the mammals of Africa and Eurasia had lot of time to evolve a fear of the humans as the proto-humans’ hunting skill slowly improved. In contrast, the giant mammals of Australia and New Guinea, without any evolutionary …”
A second text screenshot, continuing the first. It reads “preparation, suddenly confronted the humans with developed hunting skills and were soon wiped out. For the giant mammals of New Guinea and Australia, it was a sort of ‘culture clash’. The humans in New Guinea and Australia killed these giant mammals for food, and some of these animals also died indirectly due to fire and habitat modification by the humans. The net result was that the humans in New Guinea and Australia, as in the case of North and South America, were left with no indigenous animals which could be domesticated ( Diamond 2005: 42–4). So the destruction of the inmates of the ‘quasi-Jurassic Park’ in New Guinea and Australia seriously impeded the economic and technological evolution of the humans in these regions. We could speculate about a counterfactual scenario. If the one-ton lizards were domesticated and used for agriculture and riding, then the course of history would have been different...”
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SBlawnerd.bsky.social

Yeah guns germs and steel uses the image of Bantu tribesmen riding rhino cavalry fucking up European imperial armies. Truly a compelling image.

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HThalaylah.bsky.social

I am totally fucking stoned, and that still doesn't make any sense.

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avidavsky.bsky.social

*Looks at the large extant reptiles such as crocodiles in the Nile* Yeah good luck with that domestication program.

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DBdavidbflower.bsky.social

Would love to have seen a lizard army.

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AGanthonygeorgeff.bsky.social

I kind of hate this a lot because it does the colonialist ladder of peoples 'if only' for a continuous living civilisation that's over 50,000 years old.

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JLhoovybaby.bsky.social

I’d watch 6 seasons and movie

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THtapani-hopkins.bsky.social

What gets me is the elephants*. Not a single species left here 🙁 Because early humans spreading out from Africa went all "easy meat, yummy". * mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres etc

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AWalastairwilliams.bsky.social

The Lizard Armies of Australasia is a movie I want to watch

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LDbitterkarella.bsky.social

this seems really optimistic about our chances of domesticating a monster kill machine with a walnut-sized brain

1
PMpatrickmccray.bsky.social

Now THAT is a counterfactual history.

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Pat Inverted Vibe Curve Blanchfield
@patblanchfield.bsky.social
US culture, violence, politics, psychoanalysis. associate faculty at the brooklyn institute of social research ordinary unhappiness (podcast, weekly) | apocalypse vibe check (substack) 2 niche 2 live 2 on brand 2 die
3.2k followers113 following573 posts
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