Mike Thelen 🚢

Lay people don't appreciate how much of post-1960s scholarship has been invalidated by ancient DNA, nor the extent to which it's vindicated earlier scholars, nor how generations have been mal-educated. The post-60s errors are all in a single direction too: they interpret evidence through a model of human nature that predicts behaviors that run contrary to everyday intuition and observation. For example, for decades, dogma was that violence was rare until the bronze age. Of course, violence was, in fact, ubiquitous. Pots changed because people changed, not because (as scholars asserted with straight faces somehow) ideas diffused through word of mouth. You can draw your own conclusions about why the academy pushed this model so hard, but it happened at exactly the same time the academy was pushing tons of other ideas inconsistent with an intuitive understanding of human nature. Ancient DNA has made late 20th century revisionist historiography untenable, but other disciplines are still pushing related nonsense. All of it must be defunded and rebuilt.