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Ad Yurii Gloriam (Was Re: maize in ancient india: strong transpacific links are indicated)
This is an ad hominem comment, albeit written as nicely as I could manage. I
send it to this forum because Mr Kuchinsky has previoulsy stated his dislike
for private correspondence regarding these issues. If not interested, please
do not read. I apologize in advance for the use of bandwidth.
In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>
>: Obviously, I did not see the whole series, since
>: in the Nature article, they show only the two extremes of
>: the beaded object.
>
>And are you generalizing on the basis of this?
>
>Yuri.
Yuri,
This is a clear example of why you get to be soooo boring and tiresome.
You are the one that has generalized from almost anything that you think
agrees with anything that you believe supports pre-Columbian human-assisted
diffusion. You have generalized about maize on the basis of ONE
journal article. After a period of receiving sound counterarguments, you
seemingly accept problems with your "evidence", but after two or three days,
you are at it again, as in the post quoted above.
You fill your mouth with words like "scholarly" and "academic", and then you
want to resolve the whole issue with a survey of people in the streets
looking at pictures. Cannot you possibly understand that after such comments
you almost completely lack credibility?
So far, all the propositions you defend, which sometimes you claim as "yours"
(chickens, maize, ipomoea, gourds, blowguns, etc.) can be summarized using one
adjective of the following set: unlikely, not proven, improbable; a few may
be plausible, but they remain not proven.
I would love to see any evidence of true, relevant pre-Columbian contact,
because discoveries like that make life interesting, and we would have
everybody talking about something new. But such a thing does not exist, so
far. Evidence means evidence, and the only pre-Columbian contact to/from the
Old World remains that of the Scandinavian explorers, which was very limited
in its consequences. We have the archaeological remains, but no
extant cultural suggestions that they transcended their small settlements. In
almost all the other cases, your scholarly and academic sources tend to rely
heavily on apparent cultural "remains" (language, statues, etc.) than in true
archaeological evidence.
And do not expect for people in these forums to be able to disprove stuff that
you put forward, because "disproving" cannot be done, as people have
repeatedly said here. Even if you submit that, say, Cahokia was built using
digital computers from outer space, nobody can disprove that, and, at least in
my case, I will not loose any sleep because of that "inability" to send the
proposition to oblivion. Is your inability to understand this what pushes you
to post always the same stuff ("I believe... no matter what")?
I have no idea why you do this, why you need so desperately that pre-Columbian
contact existed. If you were a professional, I could perhaps understand your
urge to find a niche for yourself (even though most of your scholarly sources
are written by people for whom pre-Columbian diffusion has not been the
driving force of their careers) in a crowded field.
End of piece, venting done. Now flame me.
Domingo.
Domingo Martinez-Castilla
[email protected]
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