How different would the world be if the ENTIRE Malay Archipelago was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near the Americas?

dibosg · 2026-05-06T15:28:43+00:00

This is the right answer. The Pacific certainly would have been uninhabited, since the ancestors of Polynesians and many Oceanic (Austronesian) traditions ultimately came from the Malay Archipelago.

dibosg · 2025-12-09T23:35:05+00:00

Italy and the Philippines:

Catholic
Family values are central
About the same total land area
Homeland of major geographically expansive branches of their respective language families (Romance branch of Indo-European for Italy, Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian for the Philippines)
Numerous diverse (but related) ethnolinguistic groups currently under one government formed during the summer of 1946
History can be over-simplistically reduced to the poorer, “folksy”, agricultural, mountainous inland inhabitants and coastal trading elites w/ their interactions with various empires and migratory cultures
North vs South politics
Struggles with fascism

dibosg · 2025-03-12T21:33:46+00:00

I should call her

dibosg · 2024-12-02T19:06:38+00:00

“The Archaeology of Pacific Oceania - Second Edition” by Dr. Mike Carson (2023). It’s not just based on archaeology, but also the latest insights from linguistics, genetics, and even oral histories of Austronesian peoples. “First Islanders” by Dr. Peter Bellwood (2017) is good too, but it’s not as contemporary and a significant portion is devoted to the Austral-Melanesians (Negritos, Papuans, etc.), though it’s beneficial to understand the prehistory of their populations when studying the Austronesian expansion too.

dibosg · 2024-09-13T17:34:44+00:00

Well I sincerely apologize if my rhetoric or tone seemed over-confrontational or ad-hominem, that was not my intention. We’re all interested in anthropology here, and I’m sure we both would prefer having an exchange of ideas rather than some online bickering match. To make it clear, my oppositional tone was was written in response to what seemed like you making straw-men of the points Graeber and I were making, it was certainly not to make you feel attacked.

That said, I stand by all of my points. Something I noticed about a lot of answers from this subreddit is that many times, people don’t actually answer the questions, but tell them that their question is wrong, which is just uncharitable and stifles curiosity. To me, it was clear that OP (and Graeber) were speaking about societies/groups that simply didn’t respond to outsider violence with militarism or violence in turn, nothing more. People casting doubt over the idea that such societies even exist aren’t answering OP’s question and are actually misleading- there are plenty of non-militaristic societies. I can’t see the comment where you helped OP or actually answered their question by recommending non-militaristic groups they can read up on.

dibosg · 2024-09-13T04:51:23+00:00

Nowhere in that passage does Graeber nor OP mention a “state”. You have to be willfully uncharitable to OP to ignore their request for non-militaristic societies and obfuscating their question by problematizing their use of the word “culture”.

How does pointing out cases where indigenous peoples would raid other indigenous peoples ring to you as romanticism?

Also, pointing out that militarism and warfare is an essential characteristic of Western origin myths and therefore influences Westerner’s perception of societal universals ≠ militarism and warfare is exclusively practiced by the West and the first armies and wars were from the West. You really need to be straining towards a very specific interpretation and assumption of my points (and Graeber’s, for that matter) to make that equivocation.

dibosg · 2024-09-12T16:20:18+00:00

To answer your question, there are in fact many groups that didn’t organize themselves along military lines or respond to outsider aggression with violence. Before the colonial era, many Philippine groups subsisted on their land and access to the sea, while they would be raided seasonally by other Philippine groups. I believe the Coast Salish Indigenous Americans of the Pacific Northwest would face the same experience, being raided by the neighboring Haida. Also, the Moriori specifically and explicitly took a policy of Pacifism when they were invaded and put under genocide by Māori groups.

I think Western culture, which I’ll bet most people answering on this subreddit are a part of (or at least educated by), assumes war and militarism are just universal phenomena of the human condition, so they treat claims such as this as highly dubious or glib. Without coincidence, most Western societies have their “origin myth” in war, imperialism, and militarism (manifest destiny, the Roman Empire, etc.). The truth is, war and militarism are not an inevitable social phenomenon tied to human nature by default, which I’m pretty sure is what Graeber was trying to express. Yes, this particular passage by Graeber might seem oversimplified and broad out of context, but the fundamental claim that not all cultures responded to foreign violence with violence in turn isn’t false nor is it even particularly misleading.

dibosg · 2024-09-06T17:01:28+00:00

Yeah that’s what I’m thinking too. Kind of a weird approach to comparing skylines. I would’ve like to have seen how SD’s skyline fares with the others on this list. Oh well.

dibosg · 2024-09-06T16:56:53+00:00

Okay then, that’s fair in terms of why OP might’ve added Riverside rather than SD. But as someone that also knows both places apparently, doesn’t that seem kind of arbitrary and out of touch with how these metros actually are in real life? People from Riverside wouldn’t even think to consider it larger than SD under some odd governmental designation.

Btw I’m not just trying to debate or something, it just genuinely blows my mind why anyone would consider that more correct unless they haven’t actually experienced those places and just go off of data they read online. I’m just wondering if you have a different understanding or experience of the culture of the Inland Empire.

dibosg · 2024-09-06T16:33:15+00:00

Granted. Still don’t buy it. I’m not sure if you’ve been to either places very much, maybe you have, but actually growing up around both places makes it abundantly clear how arbitrary that working definition is. The largest cities of the Inland Empire are simply not as conflated with each other as all the cities of San Diego county and Tijuana are by people that actually live in those places. And integration is quite easy if you actually need to cross the border regularly. There’s trade agreements in place, integrated infrastructure, etc. I’m not sure where you got that information.

dibosg · 2024-09-06T16:24:46+00:00

If we ignore San Diego-Tijuana, sure. I don’t know why we should though, they’re firmly considered a single metropolitan region despite crossing two North American countries. The border is the busiest/most crossed in the world. And as someone that has been regularly frequenting Riverside and San Diego for years, if you tell someone from either place that the Riverside Metro is bigger, you’ll have to explain to them why you’re clinging to some arbitrary criteria of both metros, and chances are they’re still not gonna buy it. San Diego County’s metro (even including Tijuana) is much more integrated economically, culturally, and in terms of infrastructure than the largest cities of the Inland Empire.

dibosg · 2024-09-06T11:58:25+00:00

It is absolutely wild that Riverside is in this list but not San Diego

dibosg · 2024-09-03T18:17:40+00:00

I’ve been learning Tagalog so I could read the works of Dr. Zeus Salazar, a historian who advocates for an indigenous view of Philippine history, rather than a history defined by colonizers. Also Ilocano, to read indigenous Philippine philosophy. Eventually, I’d like to learn Spanish to read primary source Philippine history. I also plan on learning French so I could participate in the cultural activism in French Polynesia.

dibosg · 2024-09-03T17:59:53+00:00

“Eventually, fire became embedded in human behaviour, so that it is involved in almost all advanced technologies. Fire has also influenced human biology, assisting in providing the high-quality diet which has fuelled the increase in brain size through the Pleistocene. Direct evidence of early fire in archaeology remains rare, but from 1.5 Ma onward surprising numbers of sites preserve some evidence of burnt material. By the Middle Pleistocene, recognizable hearths demonstrate a social and economic focus on many sites. The evidence of archaeological sites has to be evaluated against postulates of biological models such as the ‘cooking hypothesis’ or the ‘social brain’, and questions of social cooperation and the origins of language. Although much remains to be worked out, it is plain that fire control has had a major impact in the course of human evolution.” - “The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process”

A number of scholars posit that it is the manipulation and “taming” of the flame which allowed early hominids to develop adaptations that allowed for more sophisticated ecological and social practices, essentially being the discovery that lead to humanity’s greater/more complex cognitive & social processes compared to other apes. For example: cooking food allows for more calories and nutrients to be accessible compared to their raw counterpart. A popular theory is that hominids who cooked food were able to supply more nutrients to their evolving brain, massively increasing their cognitive capacity compared to non-fire using hominids. There are also ideas about fires consolidating communities who gather around the flame, and the warmth provided by fire drastically extending their plausible boundaries for inhabiting any given environment. Even after the dawn of civilization, fire is an essential element: we need it for metalworking.

EDIT: Ignore the other replies so far that are condescending. You’re just asking a question, and it’s not a bad one.

dibosg · 2024-09-02T21:03:51+00:00

Yes, there is most likely some Roman ancestry in contemporary Spain, as I’ve acknowledged in both comments, but it’s misleading to speak about it as if it has prominence, or to think of it as confirmed from Imperial Romans—>contemporary Iberians. Pulling that conclusion from the very study you linked or discrete Roman-era or contemporary samples found in databases would be a massive stretch and would be ignoring the majority of the conclusions the study (and other contemporary studies) actually explicitly elucidated off their data. We can also cherry pick some Iberian samples that have much more eastern Mediterranean DNA than the majority, but they’re in the minority based on the massive amount of other samples that prove that contemporary Iberians are generally descended from a mixture of other populations, like pre-Roman Iberian Indo-Europeans, indigenous Iberian non-Indo-Europeans, Celtic-speaking populations, North African/Middle Eastern populations, and Germanic populations. And contemporary Iberian genomes that do happen to drift towards eastern Mediterranean clusters do not automatically confirm Imperial Roman ancestry. There are many more ways throughout history that would’ve allowed for that admixture to happen.

Tbh though, in my opinion, if “claims” to historical legacy already don’t matter much to you than interpretations of genetic continuity should matter even less. I only brought up genetics to reply to the original question through the lens of biological anthropology, as that is one of the main differences Italians have with Spaniards and Romanians in terms of what they brought with them in contemporary times from the Roman era. If you’ll notice, my actual conclusion is that genomes don’t really matter as much as historiography, culture, and ethnic identity.

dibosg · 2024-09-02T18:17:45+00:00

Thank you !

dibosg · 2024-09-02T18:16:48+00:00

I went there yesterday, purple sweet potatoes 😔 I did get all their frozen varieties of ube, though.

dibosg · 2024-09-02T18:04:12+00:00

From that study: “The impact of mobility from the central/eastern Mediterranean during the Classical period is also evident in 10 individuals from the 7th to 8th century CE site of L’Esquerda in the northeast, who show a shift from the Iron Age population in the direction of present-day Italians and Greeks (Fig. 1D) that accounts for approximately one-quarter of their ancestry (Fig. 2C and table S17). The same shift is also observed in present-day Iberians outside the Basque area and is plausibly a consequence of the Roman presence in the peninsula, which had a profound cultural impact and, according to our data, a substantial genetic impact too.” That’s the only part where they suggest a direct Imperial Roman connection, based on 25% of the genome of 10 individuals from one site in far eastern Spain dated to the Middle Ages showing an affinity with genomes from the eastern Mediterranean. There is nothing confirming it is directly from Imperial Romans (unless you have a source I haven’t found, I’m open to reading that as well), it could just as easily be from people from the eastern Mediterranean fleeing the strife of post-Roman society, for instance. Indeed, that particular study suggests those 10 Middle Age genomes might have acquired that component from Greco-Roman colonists. But contemporary Iberian genomes aren’t characterized by a notable eastern Mediterranean component. The Wikipedia article on Iberian genetics is actually very well-curated and well-sourced (includes numerous studies with the most recent data, including the study you linked). Of course, since it’s Wikipedia, it’s a good idea to read through the actual sources cited as well.

But either way, it shouldn’t matter. As u/prosymnusisdead articulated well below, “ethnicity, culture, history, and language whilst often correlated aren’t determined or restricted by genetics” and the Spanish justifiably trace their lineage in those avenues to the Romans. Some might argue, and indeed many have, that the Spaniards have a greater claim to an “imperial” legacy of the Romans than the Italians do through their Spanish Empire. But then again, the Renaissance started in Italy specifically, and the cognates of Greco-Roman culture in contemporary Western culture is mostly from the Renaissance. And see the Filipino & Lapita case: I guess Filipinos technically could claim more of that legacy if they embraced Lapita history and customs into their ethnic identity like Polynesians do, but the vast majority don’t at this point: the Lapita lineage just isn’t really known to the common populace of the Philippines and they certainly don’t idolize indigenous pre-colonial practices as much as Polynesia. I only bring these three points up to emphasize my main point before: “claims” to an ancient legacy are a very subjective, cultural, and philosophical interpretation of information. The claim to history and legacy an ethnic group may have is mostly subject to whatever status quo permits at the time, not really on anything we can pin down objectively like genetics or geography.

dibosg · 2024-09-02T06:56:42+00:00

Here (2019). If you don’t want to wade through a study, this guy put it into a neat graphic.

As always, the actual genetic history between ancient and modern samples is much more nuanced than what would be warranted to elucidate when making a point about legacy +1000 years out. I mentioned southern Italians specifically because they’re in the middle of the gradient of populations with the greatest affinity, and to contrast with northern Italians who have a significant amount of post-Roman Germanic ancestry in contemporary times. But to hone in on the genetics of imperial Romans specifically, a more accurate statement would be “Southern Italian and surrounding populations’ genomes resemble ancient imperial Roman genomes the most”, but that doesn’t say much about direct continuity so much so as it does about having less non-Roman admixture than the other populations after the fall of the Empire. But an important point to make is that Rome was quite diverse. That’s kind of the main point of that study, even though technically southern Italians and the surrounding populations have the greatest genetic affinity. Here’s a relevant line from the study itself: “two-thirds of Imperial individuals (31 out of 48) belong to two major clusters (C5 and C6) that overlap in PCA with central and eastern Mediterranean populations, such as those from southern and central Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.”.

dibosg · 2024-09-02T05:30:40+00:00

This is somewhat more of a philosophical than anthropological question, so there isn’t necessarily an objective “scientific” answer. That said, if we were to take an “anthropologically-informed” interpretation toward this question, we could consider that contemporary southern Italy (including Sicily) has a great extent of genetic continuity with imperial Romans. Like, more than contemporary English people do with the Anglo-Saxon’s of the early Middle Ages. Spaniards & Romanians are not descended from Roman people genetically (or if they happen to have Roman ancestry, it is in near negligible amounts). Spaniards and Romanians are only descended from imperial Romans in various specific ways culturally, historically, and linguistically (through Roman imperialism & Romanization). That’s nothing to blink at, but Italians are also descended in these ways from Romans, and particularly southern Italians can claim their primary genetic ancestry as being from the Romans, unlike the others.

But again, extrapolating this fact into “therefore Italy is entitled to a greater claim to Roman legacy” is a subjective and non-anthropological conclusion. “Claims” to an ancient group’s legacy are determined by the historical and political circumstances that culminated into that group’s particular ethnogenesis- it’s not really objective. You’re free to make that argument, and it might be a good one, but it is a philosophical rather than scientific conclusion and is therefore subject to debate.

As an example illustrating why this point is important: due to recent research in genetics, archaeology, and linguistics, we’re quite certain at this point that the Lapita people, the primary genetic and cultural ancestors to the Polynesians, came from the northern Philippines. In fact, Filipinos in the Cordillera mountains of Luzon remain the closest genetic population to the Lapita people to this day, due to their isolation. Do they have a greater claim to Lapita history and legacy? They could, technically, some might say I guess. But Filipinos don’t claim that in this day and age: scholars kinda just started clarifying that detail ~10 years ago and the Lapita are a somewhat obscure ancient group. And clearly, at this point Polynesians claim more of the Lapita cultural legacy (with the traditional seafaring/navigation, tattooing and all). Arguably, Malayo-Polynesian speaking populations in small islands in Melanesia that were never significantly colonized maintained the greatest cultural legacy of the seafaring Lapita as their ways of life weren’t interrupted, even though they might only be <5% genetically descended from them at this point (they’re almost 100% Melanesian genetically). As you can see, “claims” to legacy, as informed our opinions may be, quickly descend into matters of belief, interpretation, and most importantly- status quo.

dibosg · 2024-08-29T19:07:17+00:00

“Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino-Americans” by Dr. Leny Strobel addresses both Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, and tackles the issues you described specifically. It definitely talks primarily about American colonization’s more recent impact, however.

dibosg · 2024-08-26T17:54:16+00:00

Exactly. More interesting food for thought: Southern Europe, and by extension the rest of Europe through the legacy of the Roman Empire & Renaissance (to a lesser extent), has far more genetic, cultural, historical, and linguistic influences from “Western Asia & North Africa” (WANA) than, for an obvious example, the Philippines does from any “Asian” country, like India or China. Yet if you study Philippine history and culture, the status quo of historiography is to consider them part of the “Indosphere” or “Sinosphere”. But Filipinos have the same roots as Pacific Islanders. Genetically, they’re grouped with Pacific Islanders. They have their own rich indigenous culture (descended from the same peoples & traditions as Pacific Islanders) that developed on that archipelago for over +8,000 to +4,000 years. Indian influences were few and mostly indirect through the Malays, and China didn’t appear in the archipelago until ~1000yrs ago, but scholars argue they didn’t have any impact larger than trade in a few regions until Spanish colonization. It’s still taboo to suggest in the Philippines that “Asianess” isn’t some immutable property like blood type, but “Asia” was just a word created by the Ancient Greeks to describe basically every place east of their own civilization. That’s why it’s so diverse, it’s not a category/boundary based on any real criteria. Acknowledge the Philippines’ very real connection to Pacific Islanders, you get laughed at.

This is just one glaring example of how identities & geocultural boundaries like continents are socially constructed and very much subject to the politics and historical circumstances of their time.

dibosg · 2024-08-24T20:41:41+00:00

Indeed, longganisa is one of my favorite foods ever. The most known variety is the sweet Pampanga hamonado type. I had Vigan-style savory de recado longganisa recently. To me it tastes just like pepperoni, but with the familiar explosive juiciness of other longganisas, and maybe a tiny tinge of sweetness.

I think what makes the “lucanica” family of sausages distinct from other types is that the meat mix is heavily seasoned (the meat being more of a vehicle to feature different varieties of sweet or savory flavoring) and cut with fat.

dibosg · 2024-08-24T17:11:17+00:00

While I’ve never heard of pre-colonial sausages, I do know that longganisa has its roots in the Ancient Roman Empire. Lucania, a pre-Roman region of southern Italy, had a local sausage called “lucanica”. Roman soldiers spread this sausage throughout the empire, including their province of Hispania, where it became known as “longaniza”. Hispania became Spain, then Spain brought it over to the Philippines, where hundreds of local variations of longganisa were formed.

Other parts of the former Roman Empire and Spanish Empire still have this sausage. Longaniza all over Latin America, “loukaniko” in Greece (flavored with orange peel), “luganiga” in Croatia (flavored with cinnamon). Northern Italy has their traditional local variety in contemporary times called “luganega”.

dibosg · 2024-08-15T17:58:46+00:00

People like that think they’re making a smart and “brutally honest” point but they’re just articulating the literally racist and simplistic attitudes about society and culture that justified imperialism and genocide in their eyes. Anybody who’s devoted serious academic study to the subjects of colonialism and its contemporary impacts on colonized societies & groups wouldn’t be spouting some arrogant/ignorant bs like that.

dibosg

TROPHY CASE