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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

This is still nothing compared to the migrations of "modern" humans, no?

One of my favorite ideas about human nature is that we are absolutely driven to explore. We walked all the way from Mesopotamia across all of Europe and down to the top of South America! Some ancient madlad hollowed out a boat and paddled to Australia! Why would someone do that?? But we continue to do the same thing trying to get to the moon, Mars, etc. It's a defining feature of the human race.

It's interesting that the neanderthals walked from Europe to Asia, but it's nothing compared to our ancestors explorations.

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BTW, I think there was a land bridge to Australia for a time, though not all the way to the Asian continent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallacea

It is perhaps unknowable whether someone went of exploring for years, then actually came back and got his/her remaining clan to migrate great distances. More likely that those migrations were multi-generational: the clan moved 20-50 miles every season following the game, and the descendants eventually got to a different continent.

However, there are examples of somewhat shorter distances in more modern times: I find it fascinating how the different cultures of Europe moved about: the Scandinavians to England and Normandy, later the Normans to Spain, Sicily, and Africa, the Slavs to the Balkans and Adriatic, etc. These are perhaps 1000 miles at most, but it seems like an entire warrior class and parts of the population went far away, conquered and installed themselves for generations in a foreign (and fully populated) place.

A couple of interesting articles I read concerning early arrival in Australia recently:

http://theconversation.com/when-did-aboriginal-people-first-...

https://www.sciencealert.com/50-000-years-ago-hundreds-of-an...

The theories contained in those articles include the ideas that they arrived initially in relatively large numbers in a somewhat organized fashion, and migrated around the Australian coastline in both directions.

I don’t think we were driven to explore so much as we were hunter gatherers often following our food, especially as human densities in one area came to exceed the number of hunter gatherers that area could support.

(The Pacific Islanders are perhaps an exception)

Carrying capacity and land bridges (excepting far-later Polynesians), AOHS.

But we're ridiculously adaptable, tropic to artic.

Maybe that, too. But any other species that had the same drive could not have accomplished what we have.

Our killer app is intelligence. Maybe cheetahs were also driven to expand, but they were far less adaptable than us, so places that were barriers to them were no obstacle to us.

On the contrary, cheetahs likely evolved in North America, and all modern African cheetahs are descended from the small number that made that migration. There is still a small population of them in Iran too, a remnant from that journey.

Right, but no cheetas in Greenland, Hawaii, the Andes, on the banks of the Zaire river, in Sahara, in the Ganges Delta, and so on and so forth.

In Ganges delta they were present:

Reintroduction of the cheetah in India involves the re-establishment of a population of cheetahs into areas where they had previously existed but were hunted into extinction during and after the Mughal Period, largely by Rajput and Maratha Indian royalty and later by British colonialists, until the early 20th century when only several thousand remained. The Mughal emperor Akbar kept Cheetahs for hunting gazelle and blackbucks. Trapping of large numbers of adult Indian cheetahs, who had already learned hunting skills from wild mothers, for assisting in royal hunts is said to be another major cause of the species rapid decline in India as they never bred in captivity with only one record of a litter ever

It's always amazing how many people on this forum, while allegedly smart, keep taking simple, basic statements in a completely wrong way.

Guys, stop, take a deep breath, step away from the computer, take in the real world. Not everything you see is simple, bare facts explained until there's no ambiguity left. If real world worked like that, it would be a bunch of pixels and geeks would rule.

So... figures of speech, anyone?

Same with horses

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