Vanuatu – Brown Pundits https://www.brownpundits.com A discussion of all things Brown.. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:24:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1.3 https://www.brownpundits.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/cropped-cropped-cropped-147.-Dancing-Girl-MET-MUS-32x32.jpg Vanuatu – Brown Pundits https://www.brownpundits.com 32 32 The hammer of the All-Father https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/01/18/the-hammer-of-the-all-father/ https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/01/18/the-hammer-of-the-all-father/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2019 11:48:59 +0000 https://www.brownpundits.com/?p=7949
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, a mildly slanderous piece in The New York Times Magazine has taken aim at David Reich and his band of paleogeneticists, Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps? I address this piece at my other weblog.

One of the major themes of the piece are the legends and myths of the people of Vanuatu:

I asked him about how the concept of Lapita migration to empty islands had been received by people whose oral traditions said they came from a stone or a coconut tree.

The reason this is relevant is that paleogeneticists have probed the history of Vanuatu. And yet this is the past. The future is that the Reich lab is collaborating with other paleogeneticists to crack the nut of the history of the Indian subcontinent with ancient DNA. They’ve been working on this for years, and they are working on it now. There are 275,000 people who live in Vanuatu. There are 1.7 billion people who live in the Indian subcontinent.

Within the next year I believe that the Reich lab will publish results which will falsify the beliefs of a substantial number of Indians about the nature of the origins of the native peoples of the region. This will shatter world-views, undermine mythologies, and rock peoples’ worlds. There will be sophists who live in denial, but the truth will be plain to those who see.

I understand that some of you reading this disagree with this assessment. Ultimately I don’t care because the data are coming, and if I’m wrong, that’s OK too. I don’t have emotional baggage invested in alternative models. But, I do wonder why the mythological traditions of “non-indigenous” people seem to warrant less attention than smaller nations or premodern tribes.

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