This is the third Q&A for History of Mankind. Paid subscribers received an email soliciting questions and I got some. I picked the five that I think I can shed the most light upon:
Question 1 — (by Anonymous): “I loved the update you gave on Indo-European studies in your second Q&A. Is there any other update/correction you can give us on older posts (perhaps you don’t think Cretans were pirates anymore?)”
Answer — There’s something I’d like to share on that vein. I recently came across some studies of folk traditions about small, Negrito-like humans that modern humans used to come across are also widely spread and reflected in, for example, the Hawaiian legends about so-called Menehune dwarfs. If you’ll recall, I discussed Negritos in a wide-ranging post about Taiwanese Seafarers of the Pacific and the wonders they encountered as they spread in the biggest multi-generational migration in human history.
Also, Peter Frost just published a book discussing the reasons why Europeans, and only Europeans (mostly), developed various eye and hair colors, and did it very recently. I haven’t yet read the book but it sounds very interesting. From Frost’s own summary of the text, he doesn’t fundamentally alters the explanation on the subject I provided in this early entry about pre-Historic Eurasians, other perhaps than his important point that both hair and eye color are polygenic traits that involve over a hundred alleles, something I should have stressed in my post.
Regarding my conviction that the ancient Cretans were pirates, based on evidence and logic but not shared by the historical consensus, let me point out that I’m sticking to it until I see evidence to disprove it; all new evidence about Crete, coming up in recent years, has only been reinforcing my theory.
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