They used the area as a cemetery for nearly a millennium, starting in the 6th century BCE, centuries before the construction of Egypt's pyramids.
Wasn’t the Great Pyramid built around the 27th century BCE?
It took billions of years of universe-stretching for the CMB to redshift to microwave, I don’t think me pushing pedal to the metal for a few seconds on a rocket ship is going to counteract all those years.
We do see shifts in the CMBR due to local velocity changes though—for instance, we can tell that the sun is moving at about 370 km/s relative to the CMBR frame due to its radial movement through the galaxy and the motion of the galaxy itself through space.
There have been studies suggesting prefrontal synthesis (the ability to consciously construct novel mental images) doesn’t develop in humans unless they learn a language before the age of five or so.
The wavelength of a photon isn’t intrinsic to the photon itself—it depends on the observer’s inertial frame. The Hubble redshift occurs because expansion affects the velocity of observers relative to the photons’ original frame, not because it affects photons directly.
But without that explanation, the claim that the Indonesia site supports the Africa hypothesis isn’t true—and it actually reinforces the same Eurocentrism that motivates hypothesis 2.
On the face of it, the claim that representational art originated wherever we find the earliest evidence of it seems innocent enough. And if you really believe it innocently, the Indonesia site doesn’t affect your belief one way or the other. It’s only if you had an underlying Eurocentric motive for believing the earliest-evidence theory that the Indonesia site motivates you to switch to the alternative theory (which at least still credits the direct ancestors of Europeans with the invention of art). So saying the new site supports the Africa theory is taking for granted the Eurocentric worldview that would motivate that switch.
Hypothesis 2 was never plausible.
That’s my point: if 2 was never plausible in the first place, then changing the proposed origin from Europe to Indonesia doesn’t affect the likelihood one way or the other. Saying the Indonesian evidence supports the African hypothesis without explaining why is quietly letting the implied white supremacism off the hook without calling it out.
Sure, the African-origin hypothesis is plausible—IMO it was the obvious answer all along. But taking the Indonesian art as “reinforcement” of that hypothesis requires a bit of a logical leap.
Consider the two traditional hypotheses:
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Representational art originated in Africa with the ancestors of modern humans, and spread with their migrations; or
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Representational art originated where we find the earliest examples of it, and spread from there via cultural diffusion.
Hypothesis 2 was considered plausible as long as the earliest examples were from Europe. Finding earlier art in Indonesia doesn’t inherently support hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2 unless you combine it with the assumption that cultural innovations spreading from Europe is more plausible than innovations spreading from Indonesia. But that assumption isn’t even addressed—it’s just silently taken for granted.
“We will now remove content that targets ‘Zionists’ with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence on the basis that ‘Zionist’ in those instances often appears to be a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people,” Meta said in a blog post.
So dehumanization and calls for harm are fine, as long as the target isn’t a proxy for Jews or Israelis?
The fallacy is imagining that “lawfulness” is an attribute that can be reliably detected on an implementation level.
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.
Rather than creating a custom terminal app, could you create a user that only had permission to run the restricted commands, with a profile script that gets run at login and offers a menu of common tasks?