• kersplooshA
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    3 days ago

    Guns, Germs, and Steel covers that in a brief but eye-opening way. When Hernando de Soto’s crew first explored the Mississippi river in 1541 they wrote about all the people they found, but did not mention bison. A century later another set of Spanish explorers revisited the Mississippi and didn’t record much at all about people, but commented on how prolific the bison were.

    • RowRowRowYourBot
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      3 days ago

      Worth noting GGS is incredibly poorly received in the anthropology community. If this was reddit most of the major history and anthro subs have a bot to debunk much of it.

      Jarred Diamond, the author of GGS, is an eye doctor and bird expert. He isn’t a good source for this stuff.

      • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        I learned that after I starting looking more into CGP greys videos. He straight up knew GGS was a bad source and used it as his main talking point because fuck it.

        • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 days ago

          CGP Grey is such an odd person. Charming, good presentation, sometimes has weird takes.

          His video on how to solve traffic uses “mass automatic cars talking to each other” which ignores hundreds of thousands city planners and other actual experts advice: public transit.

          • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee
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            3 days ago

            that was actually one of the videos that made me start looking into the other stuff he was saying. He’s a tech optimist to a fault.

          • RowRowRowYourBot
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            3 days ago

            Worth noting that “solution” was strongly promoted when I sold cars. If you do have some from of assistive cruise control you should use it.