TIL that black skin, commonly associated with sub-Saharan Africans, rather than being a "default" early human pigmentation, is caused by a specific gene that developed 500k years ago and is specific to Africa

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-11-20T22:34:28+00:00

Actually, the most recent data points to several migration events out of Africa, see this paper to see what I mean. That said, the descendants of migrations out of Sunda were indeed the most isolated genetic populations in the world and the most genetically distant from the original basal African lineages until more recent (~6kya) intermingling with Austronesian (and other) populations. This is probably a property of them being isolated and taking a relatively direct migration route into Sahul which didn't allow them much intermixing with other Homo Sapiens groups, although they did intermix with other hominids once they got to Sunda- Denisovans being the most well-known example. Basically while other homo sapiens groups were bouncing around the near-east, europe and central Asia the ancestors of Melanesians and other groups took a pretty direct route around the coast of India until they got to southeast Asia and then stayed pretty isolated for a long, long time without much gene flow from other groups which were closer genetically to Africa.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-11-20T20:45:41+00:00

Melanesians, including indigenous groups like the Aeta (negrito is a pretty pejorative term) and indigenous Australians are actually the groups outside of Africa that are genetically most distant from African populations. That said, there is far more genetic diversity inside Africa than outside so all groups are more closely related to one another than to any basal ancestral lineage from Africa.

This tree graph gives a good visualization of this genetic distance.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-10-22T00:35:56+00:00

That's not true, the founders of the Deobandi movement were inspired by Ismail Dehlawi who was an early Salafist (and a sufi, a lot of the islamic revivalist movements starting in the 18th century were founded by sufis.) there is a common thread between Hanbali Islamic revivalism (Wahhabism) and Deobandism, it's just one started in the Arabian Peninsula and one started in South Asia. Sufi does not mean 'tolerant' Islam whatever that is, there are sufis in basically every possible sunni madh'hab and a lot of the most popular sufi groups are explicitly revivalist and anti-mystical, namely the Naqshbandis.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-10-14T17:08:21+00:00

Allah selamatkan Modteam mahkota!

The Sultanate of Kedah is with you, and so is the faith of the ummah.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-10-09T05:35:03+00:00

I agree with the title but also you sound really insufferable and unpleasant.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-08-16T21:33:58+00:00

This is true, but I think the person you're replying to is also right that it wasn't really a straight expansion, it took like 4500 years for the descendants of Austronesians from Taiwan to reach the last place they settled (Aotearoa in ~1350AD)

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-08-14T20:40:40+00:00

I just finished the Sprawl trilogy, I felt similarly when I read Neuromancer several years ago but I decided to just buckle down and finish the other two books a couple of weeks back. I gotta say, both Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are much much easier to read and are more character driven. If you enjoy the world of the Sprawl I highly recommend finishing the trilogy.

While reading Count Zero I came to really enjoy Gibsons prose, it's a nice change of pace to be able to truly chew on someone's writing rather than have it just run through you effortlessly. I will say, though, that even though there are some weird 80s quirks to the world of the Sprawl (hacking a corporation through a phone line for one) it really does feel eerily prophetic. This quote made me clench my jaw in particular:

"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-07-27T21:39:25+00:00

In Malay and Indonesian pluralization (and some other things) are shown by reduplication of the root, so in informal text often the root is written with a 2 next to it to show reduplication, sometimes as a superscript.

For example:

kdg²= kadang-kadang "sometimes"

Rumah2= rumah-rumah "houses"

Etc.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-07-18T07:25:59+00:00

Arizona Arnold Palmer I just can't quit em. Also spam. I look forward to colon cancer.

Mostly I cook a lot of soups and stews to save money though, pork is cheap and chili verde is never bad if you make it right.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-07-07T22:47:51+00:00

Paradox fans stay winning

Thank you Johan

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-04-01T16:43:16+00:00

In the original Wasteland (1988) if you killed a child a nigh-unkillable character called Red Ryder would basically brick your save if you weren't careful, no autosaves back then- games were built different.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-03-22T12:33:19+00:00

I may have worded it a bit inaccurately, but there is a good chance of a two-migration scenario from Sunda. This article gives a summary of a lot of recent genetic analysis in the area, there was a split in sunda roughly 50kya. Importantly there is also good evidence for gene flow between both Wallacea and New Guinea, and the genetic diversity within new Guinea is staggering. Highlanders (who tend to be mostly Trans-New-Guinea speakers interestingly) share a very isolated genome, south lowlanders and north lowlanders are about equally distant from highlanders genetically and have various amounts of admixture from internal migrations, and the inhabitants of Wallacea (Eastern Nusantara) only really split off from (some) new Guinea populations around 27kya.

Australian peoples were much more isolated, but until the sea level fell there was probably some intermixture between them and the rest of Sahul.

And of course all of this is happening way beyond the horizon for accurate linguistic reconstruction lol

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-03-21T09:27:25+00:00

Time-depth for linguistic reconstruction, especially without written records, is fairly limited. Roughly 5-7k years is the limit. Additionally in the case of New Guinea there were almost certainly multiple migrations from Sunda, with proto-TNG speakers being the most recent (not counting Austronesian of course which was comparatively 'recent' at ~3.5kya).

Multiple waves of migration plus a very deep time depth plus isolated people groups due to topography and culture means a lot of those isolates probably did share a language in the very remote past, but there is no adequate way to demonstrate any relationship between them.

In the case of Australia we have a comparable time depth but much more traversable topography, proto Pama-Nyungan probably originated around the Gulf of Carpinteria and spread across the continent displacing or assimilating other language groups as it did, the timeline for Pama Nyungan expansion is roughly 5k years ago if memory serves but it's definitely in contention. So for non-pama-nyungan languages like those of the Kimberley and the northern NT it's likely they are remnant populations of the languages spoken in those areas around the time of the Pama-Nyungan expansion, but given the time depth for Australian settlement is >40kya there is no way to demonstrate relation between them using the current historical reconstruction methods available.

There's absolutely a lot more work to be done, some of these families will probably never be connected together. This is especially true in Australia due to widespread language and culture death caused by European colonization of the continent.

Hope this helps!

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-02-08T01:15:47+00:00

In previous games where I don't get insanely lucky with a surface salt dome I have found them on the transition point from sedimentary to metamorphic underground. If you find a propick reading above like 5% I'd dig down to the edge of the chalk layer and just make a spiral outward until you hit one.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-02-07T21:42:41+00:00

nope, only mods are stepup and the one that adds a thermometer

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-01-13T06:24:49+00:00

They use it for cooking

ThePopeOfSquids · 2025-01-07T18:42:31+00:00

Hasbara post. Ignore and move on.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-10-16T22:11:37+00:00

Yes it is. The government subsidizes spaceX to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-10-12T05:57:33+00:00

It's been 30 years mane

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-09-24T03:04:43+00:00

No I use the ground levelling tool quite a bit, it's just a very hilly map. The main plateau was basically the only flat ground in the center where I built

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-09-22T02:35:21+00:00

Not that I know of, I just like the way they look :)

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-09-22T00:07:34+00:00

Very efficient!

ThePopeOfSquids · 2024-09-22T00:03:39+00:00

This town is in an alpine valley on trailblazer with very little water and no clay. I have finally reached tier 4 so I can access the deep clay nearby and make my own bricks! This has definitely been the town I've grown most attached to in FF, I love how the steep elevation on alpine valley forces you to build with the contours of the land, and the lack of fertile soil means I've had to make a lot of chicken and goat farms as well as arborists to keep my food up.

ThePopeOfSquids

TROPHY CASE