ORIGINS OF THE OCEANIA BATTLEFIELD BETWEEN #PRC AND #US: 2/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific, by Nicholas Thomas. @MAACambridge.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Voyagers-Settlement-Pacific-Nicholas-Thomas/dp/1541619838
An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account.
The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?
In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.ORIGINS OF THE OCEANIA BATTLEFIELD BETWEEN #PRC AND #US: 1/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific, by Nicholas Thomas. @MAACambridge.
https://www.amazon.com/Voyagers-Settlement-Pacific-Nicholas-Thomas/dp/1541619838
An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account.
The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?
In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.
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| 0:00.0 | With Peloton offering up to 400 pounds of selected bike plus and tread packages, |
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| 0:28.4 | See one Peloton. code at UK. This is a series, CVS, I am the world. |
| 0:37.0 | I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:38.0 | Professor Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Historical Anthropology |
| 0:41.0 | at Cambridge University, also the director of archaeology and anthropology |
| 0:45.8 | museum at Cambridge, his new book is voyagers. |
| 0:49.5 | And we plunge into the 19th century and are amazed that a chieftain significant that he's a leadership |
| 0:57.4 | position in the Cook Islands, this is Polynesia, is able to direct a European sailing master without use of |
| 1:08.7 | European tools. |
| 1:10.4 | Now we go back to the beginning beginning, at least until the retreat of the last ice. |
| 1:15.0 | This is about 11,000 years ago and we're not in Polynesia, that's well to the east. We're not in Melanesia, we're in Formosa Taiwan now and the line, |
| 1:29.1 | the north-south line called Walassia, forgive my pronunciation, professor. |
| 1:35.7 | What is it that we understand about the voyagers from the mainland into and crossing Wallacia. |
| 1:46.8 | There are two stages to this incredible chapter in human history and it is worth underscoring just how incredible this story is because |
| 2:00.1 | otherwise since the beginnings of human history, since the beginnings of our species, people have been continent-based. |
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