West Hunter

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019,  2020, 2021,  2022, and 2023.

Undersea Victory

In the Shadow of Man

A Short History of Medicine

Helicobacter Pioneers

Past Master

The Merck Manual

A New Voyage Round the World

Russia under the Bolshevik Regime

Africa, a biography of the continent

Reflections on Net Assessment

America in Vietnam

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Ancient Iraq

The Syndic

Not This August

Maker of Universes

The Economics of World War II

The Fatal Shore

Sweet Silver Blues

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019,  2020, 2021, and 2022.

The Balance of Tomorrow

Stirling’s Desert Raiders

Among the Elephants

Adventures of a Mathematician

Sociobiology

States of Matter

Parkinson’s Law

Brothers in Arms

Muqaddimah

Admiral of the Ocean Sea

The Art of War in the Sixteenth Century

Twenty-Five Years in a Waggon in South Africa

The Big Con

The Global Seven Years War

Barrayar

Beyond This Horizon

Legacy of Heorot

The Day Before Forever

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel

The Ultimate Resource

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019,  2020, and 2021.

Defeat into Victory

Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges

Go Tell The Spartans

Don Quixote

A Fire Upon the Deep

A Deepness in the Sky

Scientists Against Time

Days of Atonement

The Mythical Man-Month

Island in the Sea of Time

The High Crusade

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

This Kind of War

The Measure of Reality

The Jews of Islam

The Vinland Sagas

The Chronicle of Theophanes

Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942

The Crusades and the Holy Land

Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake

Montezuma, Atahualpa, Santa Ana

Georgy Flerov was a young nuclear physicist in the Soviet Union who ( in 1943) sent a letter to Stalin advocating an atomic bomb project. It is not clear that Stalin read that letter, but one of Flerov’s arguments was particularly interesting: he pointed out the abrupt and complete silence on the subject of nuclear fission in the scientific literature of the US, UK, and Germany – previously an extremely hot topic.

Stopping publications on atomic energy ( which happened in April 1940) was a voluntary effort by American and British physicists. But that cessation was itself a signal that something strategically important was going on.

Imagine another important discovery with important strategic implications: how would you maximize your advantage ?

Probably this is only practically possible if your side alone has made the discovery. If the US and the UK had continued publishing watered-down nuclear research, the paper stoppage in Germany would still have given away the game. But suppose, for the moment, that you have a monopoly on the information. Suddenly stopping closely related publications obviously doesn’t work. What do you do?

You have to continue publications, but they must stop being useful. You have to have the same names at the top ( an abrupt personnel switch would also be a giveaway) but the useful content must slide to zero. You could employ people that A. can sound like the previous real authors and B. are good at faking boring trash. Or, possibly, hire people who are genuinely mediocre and don’t have to fake it.

Maybe you can distract your rivals with a different, totally fake but extremely exciting semiplausible breakthrough.

Or – an accidental example of a very effective approach to suppression. Once upon a time, around 1940, some researchers began to suspect that duodenal ulcers were caused by a spiral bacterium. Some physicians were even using early antibiotics against them, which seemed to work. Others thought what they were seeing might be postmortem contamination. A famous pathologist offered to settle the issue.

He looked, didn’t see anything, and the hypothesis was buried for 40 years.

But he was wrong: he had used the wrong stains.

So, a new (?) intelligence tactic for hiding strategic breakthroughs: the magisterial review article.

By which I mean multi-step causal chains that are part of a complex plan – something intended by some individual or group. In the strong form, one for which the initial push is sufficient, so that the ball ends up in the right place without any continuing guidance. In practice, we’re talking patterns like that in human affairs.

They don’t exist. And when someone says ” Group X must have intended Y”, invoking that kind of logic – he’s an idiot. Pay him no never mind.

I don’t think the story is perfectly clear right now. But suppose it becomes clear. Suppose that we find that Covid-19 was ( for sure) the accidental product of virologists working in a Wuhan lab, funded by the US government.

What would happen?

I’ve been reading Thin on the Ground, a book by Stephen Churchill. One of his ideas is based on the fact some predator species are dominant over others and get the lion’s share (cough, cough) of the kills. Lions frequently steal carcasses from hyenas, while everyone steals from cheetahs and wild dogs, etc.

There is good evidence ( stable isotope data) that Neanderthals were highly carnivorous, and that they used thrusting spears, which are effective but not as generally useful as atlatls – standoff weapons. Churchill suspects that with their thrusting spears tech, Neanderthals were _not_ the top dogs of the predator guild, and that they may have been dominated by cave lions and scimitar cats, while having approximately equal status with hyenas. In practice, this would mean that Neanderthals often lost kills to high-ranked carnivores such as cave lions. The majority of calories from animal kills would go to higher-ranked carnivores ( not to Neanderthals) . Neanderthal population size would be limited, and some environments ( like open plains, where kills are highly visible) might be effectively closed to them.

Neanderthals don’t seem to take much advantage of the Atlantic salmon runs – maybe da Bears didn’t let them.

We think of Man as #1, and generally that’s the case nowadays, but it wasn’t always true.

So imagine that the Predecessors, the population that left those footprints at White Sands, didn’t have the atlatl. They may have arrived as fishermen, and may have been gradually re-inventing and improving their hunting techniques. They had to compete with short-faced bears, sabertooth tigers, the American lion, dire wolves, the American cheetah, grizzly bears, and wolves. Their diet was not as limited as that of the Neanderthals – North America was warming and plant foods were available – but they may have been dominated by some of the larger predators. if so, their cut of the herbivores may have been limited, they may have been limited to certain kinds of terrain, etc. They may have been thin on the ground, like Neanderthals.

Third example: we know that modern humans arrived even earlier in Australia/New Guinea ( then joined as Sahul), and those humans _were_ ecologically dominant, even though they did _not have atlatls ( until fairly recently), as far as we know. They became common enough to leave noticeable numbers of artifacts and skeletons, and they drove most of the Australian megafauna to extinction.

Why would human domination be easy in Australia and hard for Predecessors in the Americas?

I would guess because the dominant predators of Sahul were reptiles and marsupials.

They’re dumb.

You might also be interested in my booklists from from 2014, 2016, 2017,  2018,  2019, and 2020 .

A Savage War of Peace

The Canterbury Tales

Adaptation and Natural Selection

Anabasis

Janissaries

Gallic Wars

A World Out of Time

The Peace War

The Archimedes Codex

Domestication of Plants in the Old World

Andrei Sakharov: memoirs

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

Beowulf

The Complete Paintings of Durer

Evolutionary Biology of Aging

Evolution and the Theory of Games 

My 60 Memorable Games

The Discovery of the Solomon Islands by Alvaro de Mendaña in 1568

Warlords of Oman

Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

The problem with the idea of an early, pre-Amerindian settlement of the Americas is that ( by hypothesis, and some evidence ) it succeeded, but ( from known evidence) it just barely succeeded, at best. Think like an epidemiologist ( they’re not all stupid ) – once humans managed to get past the ice, they must have had a growth factor greater than 1.0 per generation – but it seems that it can’t have been a lot larger than that, because if they had averaged, say, 3 surviving kids per generation ( r = 1.5) , their population would have exploded, filling up all the habitable territories south of the glaciers in less than 2000 years.

(1.5)^40 multiplies the original population by a factor greater than ten million !

A saturated hunter-gatherer population inhabiting millions of square miles leaves a fair number of artifacts and skeletons per millennium – but we haven’t found much. We have, so far, found no skeletons that old. I don’t think we have a lot of totally convincing artifacts, although I’m no expert at distinguishing artifacts from geofacts. ( But these were modern humans – how crude do we expect their artifacts to be?)

For-sure footprints we’ve got, and intriguing genetic data.

A priori, I would expect hunter-gatherers entering uninhabited America to have done pretty well, and have high population growth rates, especially after they become more familiar with the local ecology. There is good reason to think that early Amerindians did: Bayesian skyline analysis of their mtDNA indicates fast population growth. They were expert hunters before they ever arrived, and once they got rolling, they seem to have wiped out the megafauna quite rapidly.

But the Precursors do not seem to have become numerous, and did not cause a wave of extinctions ( as far as I know. check giant turtles.). What might have limited their biological success?

Maybe they didn’t have atlatls. The Amerindians certainly did.

Maybe they arrived as fishermen and didn’t have many hunting skills. Those could have been developed, but not instantaneously. An analogy: early Amerindians visited some West Coast islands and must have had boats. But after they crossed the continent and reached the Gulf of Mexico, they had lost that technology and took several thousand years to re-develop it and settle the Caribbean. Along this line, coastal fishing settlements back near the Glacial Maximum would all be under water today.

Maybe they fought among themselves to an unusual degree. I don’t really believe in this, am just throwing out notions.

Maybe their technology and skills set only worked in a limited set of situations, so that they could only successfully colonize certain niches. Neanderthals, for example, don’t seem to have flourished in plains, but instead in hilly country. On the other hand, we don’t tend to think of modern human having such limitations.

One can imagine some kind of infectious disease that made large areas uninhabitable. With the low human population density, most likely a zoonosis, perhaps carried by some component of the megafauna – which would also explain why it disappeared.