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by quotemstr 1067 days ago
Come on: if you're excavating an ancient village and find a layer of charcoal littered with arrowheads and skulls and find totally different pottery before and after the charcoal layer, then unless your brain has been codrycepted by fashionable academic nonsense, you're going to conclude that someone conquered that village and replaced its people --- not that the charcoal layer represents some kind of ceremonial swords-to-plowshares peaceful pottery replacement ceremony. For 50 years, academics insisted on the latter interpretation. If you'd read old books, you'd know the post-1960s consensus was nonsense even without ancient DNA. Ancient DNA merely created a body of evidence so totally compelling that not even diffusionists (the "pots not people" crowd) could stick to their stories and keep a straight face.