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#National Culture
mjalford98 · 4 days
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A collection of photos from the St Patrick's Day parade in Bristol on Sunday 17th of March. For a celebration of traditional Irish culture, it was quite modern and flamboyant, and not without its references to more progressive political agendas (though I've heard of worse), it was wonderful to see how many people come together to enjoy and appreciate a culture that, inasmuch as it has spread across the globe, remains of distinct localised origin.
This is why I am a photographer, to explore in visuals culture in all its various forms, the good, the bad, and the ugly, exploring what makes communities tick, what brings people together, and what pulls them apart. It is local culture that brings communities together, forging links between people and the places the live in, no matter their origin or background, and if we want local and national cultures to continue playing that role, then we must do everything to preserve their identity and uniqueness through all the cultural convolutions of an increasingly globalised world.
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redd956 · 1 year
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Different Types of Culture
We as constant internet consumers often and very easily forget that culture is a mosaic. Not one person has one type of culture, and everyone you meet and talk to are walking kaleidoscopes of cultures.
Cultures derives from everything a person consumes, and every thought a person processes. When writing characters from cultures we are not familiar with we must research. 
However since so many types of cultures are never brought up people don’t realize it’s something that they may need to touch up on. Many people don’t even realize what cultures they aren’t apart of, and make mistakes in speaking up on situations that they know little about.
So here are some different types of culture
National
National is not the same racial/ethnic culture, even though the two go hand in hand. National or racial are often the cultural archetypes that come to mind when culture is mentioned.
National is culture that derives from the country we come from, and the experiences we hold with it. National culture can range from big things such as the average beliefs, to little things like what shape the toilet is supposed to be.
Racial/Ethnic
Racial is not the same as national culture. It derives from the ethnicity someone is, and how they were raised as that ethnicity. 
All the around the world there are culture wars going on over racial and ethnic cultures. Ethnic culture, like all types of cultures, can carry great historical burdens from all sides. People are very aggressive right now on how ethnic culture should be handled and viewed. And it is important to remember that culture reflects off of every individual differently.
Racial culture shows through in a multitude of ways, such as cooking style, celebrations and common beliefs, and even strings of dialects and languages that formed amongst the culture.
Socioeconomic
Socioeconomic culture derives off of people’s social/economic status, including class, position in society as a worker, and the privileges that come with money. There are many different socioeconomic statues, and unfortunately there is a lot of problems between how socioeconomic cultures treat each other. 
The bottom of the barrel lower classes are mistreated and exploited constantly. There is also confusion about whether or not people classify as either lower class or middle class. In some countries a lower middle class has aggressively formed, and many people in that class view themselves as just lower class.
Socioeconomic culture shows itself as behaviors and beliefs. People of wealthy culture approach many situations differently than those of lower class culture. Today is often shown in clothing style, and treatment of that clothing.
Identity Culture (Gender, Sexualities, Etc.)
Identity culture has always been a thing, however been aspects of it and how it is viewed has changed drastically over the years. It is important to note that many grew up with different values in identity culture, and many all around the world still are.
Identity culture derives from how we label and identify ourselves. Many people can be apart of labels but decide not to go by them. These cultures show themselves in different ways; pride parades, man caves, clothing style, etc.
other
There are many other types of culture, and it is more than important to note that culture constantly changes. New cultures form, some cultures die off, but culture is constantly changing. I may make a part two for other types of cultures....
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the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"
just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible
#due to the Great Data Decay academics write viciously argumentative articles on which episodes aired in what order#at conferences professors have known to engage in physically violent altercations whilst debating the air date number of household viewers#90% of the couch gags have been lost and there is a billion dollar trade in counterfeit “lost copies”#serious note: i'll be honest i always assumed it was english imperialism that made shakespeare so inescapable in the 19th/20th cent#like his writing should have become obscure at the same level of his contemporaries#but british imperialists needed an ENGLISH LANGUAGE (and BRITISH) writer to venerate#and shakespeare wrote so many damn things that there was a humongous body of work just sitting there waiting to be culturally exploited...#i know it didn't happen like this but i imagine a English Parliament House Committee Member For The Education Of The Masses or something#cartoonishly stumbling over a dusty cobwebbed crate labelled the Complete Works of Shakespeare#and going 'Eureka! this shall make excellent propoganda for fabricating a national identity in a time of great social unrest.#it will be a cornerstone of our elitist educational institutions for centuries to come! long live our decaying empire!'#'what good fortune that this used to be accessible and entertaining to mainstream illiterate audience members...#..but now we can strip that away and make it a difficult & alienating foundation of a Classical Education! just like the latin language :)'#anyway maybe there's no such thing as the 'greatest writer of x language' in ANY language?#maybe there are just different styles and yes levels of expertise and skill but also a high degree of subjectivity#and variance in the way that we as individuals and members of different cultures/time periods experience any work of media#and that's okay! and should be acknowledged!!! and allow us to give ourselves permission to broaden our horizons#and explore the stories of marginalized/underappreciated creators#instead of worshiping the List of Top 10 Best (aka Most Famous) Whatevers Of All Time/A Certain Time Period#anyways things are famous for a reason and that reason has little to do with innate “value”#and much more to do with how it plays into the interests of powerful institutions motivated to influence our shared cultural narratives#so i'm not saying 'stop teaching shakespeare'. but like...maybe classrooms should stop using it as busy work that (by accident or designs)#happens to alienate a large number of students who could otherwise be engaging critically with works that feel more relevant to their world#(by merit of not being 4 centuries old or lacking necessary historical context or requiring untaught translation skills)#and yeah...MAYBE our educational institutions could spend less time/money on shakespeare critical analysis and more on...#...any of thousands of underfunded areas of literary research i literally (pun!) don't know where to begin#oh and p.s. the modern publishing world is in shambles and it would be neat if schoolwork could include modern works?#beautiful complicated socially relevant works of literature are published every year. it's not just the 'classics' that have value#and actually modern publications are probably an easier way for students to learn the basics. since lesson plans don't have to include the#important historical/cultural context many teens need for 20+ year old media (which is older than their entire lived experience fyi)
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gravitascivics · 3 months
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FOCUSING ON THE WHO OR WHAT
Some time ago this blog visited the contribution of David Landes[1] in a very influential reader, Culture Matters, edited by two giants in the study of human affairs, Lawrence E. Harrison, and Samuel P. Huntington.  This collection of articles had at the time of its publishing, 2000, a good deal of influence among the academics of that time.  For example, Landes’ article, “Culture Makes Almost All the Difference,”[2] begins by asking a very insightful question.
          It asks:  when a problem pops up, does one inquire into “what went wrong” or “who did this to us”?  The latter question seems to be what one’s emotions push to the fore, while the former is a more reasoned concern.  Eventually, both questions are important in not only fixing what’s wrong but also devising strategies that might prevent a recurrence of whatever the problem is.
          In line with Landes’ writing, today the nation is confronted with a problem that takes up a lot of concern among the nation’s news sources in their reporting.  That is the influx of immigrants through the southern border.  In the realm of blame, a lot of that reporting comments on the politics:  is the President to blame due to a lack of harshness – closing the border to these immigrants – or is it due to the opposition party’s reluctance to meaningfully address the problem in Congress? 
Neither of these options looks at why this immigration is taking place – it is treated simply as a given.  This blogger finally heard, in passing, a commentator on TV suggest that perhaps a program of extensive investment into the economies of the nations of origin – from where these immigrants come – could address the problem and supply a solution.  Of course, this is not a quick or easy fix; it presupposes many factors being lined up and working in productive ways.  To begin with, one can question the viability of moving in this direction.
But the first step is asking why this immigration is going on with the intent of addressing the causes in a way that is true and accurate.  This posting does not make an argument for this investment plan – it doesn’t argue against it either – but addresses what all is involved with such an approach.  And with that concern, Landes provides a historical case in which a traditional society did cross the line from being a traditional and agriculturally based economy to one in which it became a leading industrial and post-industrial nation, that being Japan.
To make a comparison between south of the border nations, from Central and South America, and Japan of the 1800s, one needs to go through several different stages.  The first stage is to compare the global landscape Japan faced with the one that exists today.  Very profound differences exist between that world of nearly two centuries ago and contemporary times.  At the earlier time, there were the beginnings of what today one calls dependency relationships and what some consider to be the post dependency era.
Simplified, dependency relationships divided lesser developed countries (LDCs) among the developed countries in which a given developed country controlled the export/import markets for a set of LDCs.  An LDC would be limited to which countries it could export its mostly agricultural/natural resources products and from whom it could import industrial products.  This would be to the benefit of both the upper classes of each type of nation.  The rich of the poor countries were/are equally rich as those of the developed countries.
Some argue today that due to advanced countries not limiting themselves to “their” LDCs, the whole system has been compromised.  Others think this is overstated.  Here is what a Global South article determined to be the case on this question:
In today’s realm, dependency thoughts are still useful in analyzing the widening inequalities between the poor and rich countries, or in analysing the divisions within a developed or a developing country context. Our societies are vastly divided, and dependent relations exist within our own social facbric [sic].[3]
Whatever the situation is today, one can suppose that there are vested interests that benefit from what is and they enjoy significant political power or influential status.  So, the first challenge would be to address this imbalance of power and financial resources.
          And here, this blogger believes Karl Marx had a point, not in terms of justice – although one can see injustice being an element of this arrangement – but from a practical point of view.  Treat people with disregard, especially if there is any experience of better times, and they will seek reciprocity.  They will believe they have the right to seek revenge.  Can one see this in operation?
          This blogger believes one can.  And one does see it in the politics of today here in the US.  The Global South article comments on this practical reality:
In other words, the financial crisis of 2008 showed the inefficiency of the global capitalist system and questioned the strengths of the new liberal economic philosophy in contributing to economic equality. Aaccording to [James] Petras & [Henry] Veltmeyer … capitalism in the form of new liberal globalisation provides very poor model for changing society in the direction of social equality, participatory democratic decision making and human welfare.[4]
And it is this aspect that motivates this posting.  Before one looks at any historical example to address contemporary conditions, one needs to consider how social/economic/political landscapes of the compared nations are one to the other.
          Another factor is how comparing nations addresses basic, relevant social elements or resources.  If the aim is to transform a nation from an agriculturally based economy to an industrial one, certain infrastructure assets need to be in place or developed before any such effort begins.  And in this, Landes describes how advantaged Japan was before they began the transition.
          Landes reports:
            The Japanese went about modernization with characteristic intensity and system.  They were ready for it – by virtue of a tradition (recollection) of effective government, by their high levels of literacy, by their tight family structure, by their work ethic and self-discipline, by their sense of national identity and inherent superiority.
            That was the heart of it:  The Japanese knew they were superior, and because they knew it, they were able to recognize the superiorities of others.[5]
And that overview sets up this blog to address the steps Japan took to make Japan the modern, developed nation one observes and admires today.  It wasn’t a smooth development – World War II didn’t help – but one can safely determine that nation has made the transition.  The next posting will trace a number of the broad strategies Japan employed in that process.
[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Is It Better to Ask Who or What?,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, September 30, 2019, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2019_09_15_archive.html.
[2] David Landes, “Culture Makes Almost All the Difference,” in Culture Matters:  How Values Shape Human Progress, eds. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York, NY:  Basic Books), 2-13.
[3] “Is Dependency Theory Still Relevant Today?  A Perspective from the Global South,”  Global South:  Development Magazine, November 18, 2020, accessed December 23, 2023, URL:  https://www.gsdmagazine.org/is-dependency-theory-still-relevant-today-a-perspective-from-the-global-south/#:~:text=In%20today's%20realm%2C%20dependency%20thoughts,within%20our%20own%20social%20facbric.  British spelling.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Landes, “Culture Makes Almost All the Difference,” in Culture Matters, 8.
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verk0my · 2 months
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thorin but make him a polish nobleman
you can get a print here: inprnt! 
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azucarera-art · 7 months
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when u, a queen, come across another king, & u discuss how best to maximize ur joint slay 💅🏽✨
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edenfenixblogs · 6 days
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Ummmmm I just came home from a Filipino Jewish bakery and y’all…
Filipino Jews have won Purim and maybe the entire baked goods category.
I don’t wanna brag but I’ve acquired an ube challah and an ube hamantaschen and that doesn’t even touch the variety of pandan offerings they had. Omg. This is easily the best discovery I’ve made in my city.
And yes, they ship nationally so I will be ordering from them when I move away.
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gemsofgreece · 1 year
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Newly exhibited photos from the project Ένδυμα Ψυχής - Raiment of the Soul,  collaboration of photographer Vangelis Kyris and Bulgarian embroidery artist Anatoli Georgiev who present Greek traditional costumes, which are exhibits of the National Historical Museum of Greece. The exhibition is currently hosted in the Acropolis Museum, until March.
Attire of King Otto of Greece, 19th century.
Dress from Nisyros island, 19th century.
Dress from Zakynthos (Zante) island, 18th century.
Attire of Dimitris Mavromichalis, aide-de-camp of King Otto.
Attire of Stavros Tournikiotis, 19th century.
Urban dress of Old Athens, 18th century.
Dress from Zagori, 19th century.
Urban attire, 19th century.
See more photos of the project  x, x, x and x. 
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reasonsforhope · 1 month
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"Minnetonka first started selling its “Thunderbird” moccasins in 1965. Now, for the first time, they’ve been redesigned by a Native American designer.
It’s one step in the company’s larger work to deal with its history of cultural appropriation. The Minneapolis-based company launched in the 1940s as a small business making souvenirs for roadside gift shops in the region—including Native American-inspired moccasins, though the business wasn’t started or run by Native Americans. The moccasins soon became its biggest seller.
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[Photo: Minnetonka]
Adrienne Benjamin, an Anishanaabe artist and community activist who became the company’s “reconciliation advisor,” was initially reluctant when a tribal elder approached her about meeting with the company. Other activists had dismissed the idea that the company would do the work to truly transform. But Benjamin agreed to the meeting, and the conversation convinced her to move forward.
“I sensed a genuine commitment to positive change,” she says. “They had really done their homework as far as understanding and acknowledging the wrong and the appropriation. I think they knew for a long time that things needed to get better, and they just weren’t sure what a first step was.”
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Pictured: Lucie Skjefte and son Animikii [Photo: Minnetonka]
In 2020, Minnetonka publicly apologized “for having benefited from selling Native-inspired designs without directly honoring Native culture or communities.” It also said that it was actively recruiting Native Americans to work at the company, reexamining its branding, looking for Native-owned businesses to partner with, continuing to support Native American nonprofits, and that it planned to collaborate with Native American artists and designers.
Benjamin partnered with the company on the first collaboration, a collection of hand-beaded hats, and then recruited the Minneapolis-based designer Lucie Skjefte, a citizen of the Red Lake Nation, who designed the beadwork for another moccasin style and a pair of slippers for the brand. Skjefte says that she felt comfortable working with the company knowing that it had already done work with Benjamin on reconciliation. And she wasn’t a stranger to the brand. “Our grandmothers and our mothers would always look for moccasins in a clutch kind of situation where they didn’t have a pair ready and available to make on their own—then they would buy Minnetonka mocs and walk into a traditional pow wow and wear them,” she says. Her mother, she says, who passed away in 2019, would have been “immensely proud” that Skjefte’s design work was part of the moccasins—and on the new version of the Thunderbird moccasin, one of the company’s top-selling styles.
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[Photo: Minnetonka]
“I started thinking about all of those stories, and what resonated with me visually,” Skjefte says. The redesign, she says, is much more detailed and authentic than the previous version. “Through the redesign and beading process, we are actively reclaiming and reconnecting our Animikii or Thunderbird motif with its Indigenous roots,” she says. Skjefte will earn royalties for the design, and Minnetonka will also separately donate a portion of the sale of each shoe to Mni Sota Fund, a nonprofit that helps Native Americans in Minnesota get training and capital for home ownership and entrepreneurship.
Some companies go a step farther—Manitobah Mukluks, based in Canada, has an Indigenous founder and more than half Indigenous staff. (While Minnetonka is actively recruiting more Native American workers, the company says that employees self-report race and it can’t share any data about its current number of Indigenous employees.) Beyond its own line of products, Manitobah also has an online Indigenous Market that features artists who earn 100% of the profit for their work.
White Bear Moccasins, a Native-owned-and-made brand in Montana, makes moccasins from bison hide. Each custom pair can take six to eight hours to make; the shoes cost hundreds of dollars, though they can also be repaired and last as long as a lifetime, says owner Shauna White Bear. In interviews, White Bear has said that she wants “to take our craft back,” from companies like Minnetonka. But she also told Fast Company that she doesn’t think that Minnetonka, as a family-owned business, should have to lose its livelihood now and stop making moccasins.
The situation is arguably different for other fashion brands that might use a Native American symbol—or rip off a Native American design completely—on a single product that could easily be taken off the market. Benjamin says that she has also worked with other companies that have discontinued products.
She sees five steps in the process of reconciliation. First, the person or company who did wrong has to acknowledge the wrong. Then they need to publicly apologize, begin to change behavior, start to rebuild trust, and then, eventually, the wronged party might take the step of forgiveness. Right now, she says, Minnetonka is in the third phase of behavior change. The brand plans to continue to collaborate with Native American designers.
The company can be an example to others on how to listen and build true relationships, Benjamin says. “I think that’s the only way that these relationships are going to get any better—people have to sit down and talk about it,” she says. “People have to be real. People have to apologize. They have to want to reconcile with people.”
The leadership at Minnetonka can also be allies in pushing other companies to do better. “My voice is important at the table as an Indigenous woman,” Benjamin says. “Lucie’s voice is important. But at tables where there’s a majority of people that aren’t Indigenous, sometimes those allies’ voices are more powerful in those spaces, because that means that they’ve signed on to what we’re saying. The power has signed on to moving forward and we agree with ‘Yes, this was wrong.’ That’s the stuff that’s going to change [things] right there.”"
-via FastCompany, February 7, 2024
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intern-seraph · 17 days
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if your activism can be significantly disrupted by a few hours of award show, you're just a bad activist
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naves04 · 10 months
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alexmurison · 8 months
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Wild camping under the haze amongst the heather filled mountain side. Llyn Hywel, Eryri National Park
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muffinlance · 2 months
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I'm sorry, this was bothering me enough to send in an ask.
The stupid question is: how strict is Earth-Kingdom-is-China vs Fire-Kingdom-is-Japan generally? I mostly ask because although none of the canon characters use real Japanese names, but it feels like everyone uses Japanese names for Fire Kingdom and Chinese for Earth, which makes Chinese Wanyi for Zuko's ship not fit in.
I mean, the waters are muddied from China's historical domination over the area, and it's a really great pun, but I woke up and my brain wouldn't let go of the entirely petty issue.
Ugh. Sorry for the stupid ask, especially since I don't come bearing any like funny trivia with to mitigate with. Please feel free to disregard as well, especially since I'm too cowardly to link to my actual tumblr account.
There's absolutely no strictness, because that's a fanon division anyway, and not one I adhere to. Fanon is fake and we can make of it what we want, and I want the pretty ship name!
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ranilla-bean · 5 months
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culture tips for writing asian settings: calligraphy (pt i)
i love chinese calligraphy, to me it is just so gorgeous and i've dedicated a few scenes of my own fics to it, so here are just a few quick 'n' dirty calligraphy tips:
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the calligraphy scene in sokka's master (illustrated by korean animators!) is a pretty good depiction tbh. you write using a brush (the brushes can be hung up on a stand too)—it can be jarring to see fics mention quills or parchment. one excellent detail from the show is that sokka, who seems left-handed, has to write with his right hand—the left hand holds the sleeve out of the way. the ink is not liquid/bottled, but is in a solid stick form and has to be ground on an inkstone mixed with water
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traditionally, chinese text is written downwards, and goes from right to left across the page.
as with any other form of calligraphy, chinese calligraphy emphasises beauty of form over legibility—in the same way you wouldn't really consider times new roman font 'calligraphy'. there are different types of script in chinese, and for someone like piandao to master them is a reflection of his education and gentility. the semi-cursive below i see quite commonly in calligraphy:
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then you might have something like the cursive below is quite technical but seriously hard to read
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contrast that with something like this seal script, harking back to an older era of chinese script:
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any calligrapher worth their salt will be putting their stamp on the work, quite literally! name seals, also called "chops", are carved out of stone; ink it up with cinnabar paste and stamp it onto your artwork to get that iconic red signature. (i got one made a couple of years ago and there's a trick to stamping: breathe on the stamp surface after dipping in the paste to warm up the pigment, and when stamping put some circular pressure on the stone to get the print to come out evenly)
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i'm going to do a second part focusing a bit more on scripts from the atla world, so keep your eyes peeled...
check out:
some more calligraphy examples from singapore's national gallery
disclaimer | more tips
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blueiskewl · 6 months
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New Mexico Footprints are Oldest Sign of Humans in Americas
Fossil footprints date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, upending previous theory that humans reached continent later.
New research confirms that fossil human footprints in New Mexico are probably the oldest direct evidence of human presence in the Americas, a finding that upends what many archaeologists thought they knew.
The footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in White Sands national park and date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, according to research published on Thursday in the journal Science.
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The estimated age of the footprints was first reported in Science in 2021, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates. Questions focused on whether seeds of aquatic plants used for the original dating may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake – which could, in theory, throw off radiocarbon dating by thousands of years.
The new study presents two additional lines of evidence for the older date range. It uses two entirely different materials found at the site, ancient conifer pollen and quartz grains.
The reported age of the footprints challenges the once conventional wisdom that humans did not reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps about 15,000 years ago.
“This is a subject that’s always been controversial because it’s so significant – it’s about how we understand the last chapter of the peopling of the world,” said Thomas Urban, an archaeological scientist at Cornell University, who was involved in the 2021 study but not the new one.
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Thomas Stafford, an independent archaeological geologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was not involved in the study, said he “was a bit skeptical before” but now is convinced.
The new study isolated about 75,000 grains of pure pollen from the same sedimentary layer that contained the footprints.
“Dating pollen is arduous and nail-biting,” said Kathleen Springer, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey and a co-author of the new paper.
Ancient footprints of any kind can provide archaeologists with a snapshot of a moment in time. While other archeological sites in the Americas point to similar date ranges – including pendants carved from giant ground sloth remains in Brazil – scientists still question whether such materials really indicate human presence.
“White Sands is unique because there’s no question these footprints were left by people, it’s not ambiguous,” said Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.
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verk0my · 2 months
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bilbo and kíli in polish folk outfits
you can get a print here: inprnt! 
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