China & the Origins of Culture & Inventions

[bossel]

If you are interested, you should look up the Mitochondrial Eve, which in effect projects a mathematical vector to Africa. My source was Richard Dawkins' River out of Eden.

That's 200,000 years & still only looking backwards. If you follow history backward you will always be able to find nice straight ways. That's just how you look at it, though. History works the other way round.

Even in these 200,000 years not everything is clear. Has HSS interbred with HSN? Where did these Homo Florensiensis originate, how are they related to HSS? What about recent research that showed a single male ancestor some 60,000 years ago? How reliable & representative is the research regarding MtDNA & Y-chromosome?

This is all far from clear.

Root, sir, the word, root. There might be Latin, Sanskrit, Germanic influences, but there's a distinct root.

No, there isn't. There are several roots to English (of course depending on your definition of root). The term Anglo-Saxon alone shows 2 of them. Another question is how far you go back to find the root(s): Indo-European, or even further?

First, you need to click on all the side links!

Trying to insult me? Of course I read the whole stuff & it is pretty poor!
Most quotes are from 1 (one) source! The whole paper equals 5 (five) A4 pages, including abstract & bibliography.
To get a certificate at my university I'd have to write 10-15 pages for a proseminar, 20-25 pages in an advanced seminar (excl. abstract & bibliography). & I would have to come up with more than 8 sources, as well as use more than just 1 of these sources for 90% of the text.

The origin of the printing press has been covered exhaustively, you just need to google.

Googling wouldn't solve very much, you can find links to prove every crap on Google.
To find valid sources you need databases with scientific articles. Through one of those I found an article on the Archaeology of Type (Nature; 6/28/2001, Vol. 411 Issue 6841, p997). Quote:

"The idea of assembling a composite printing surface from small, reusable (or
moveable) pieces of type had been developed centuries earlier in the Far East, but unlike papermaking, there is no evidence of a slow
diffusion of this technology to Europe. Printing appears to have evolved independently several times; all modern printing, however, derives from Gutenberg. In distinguishing his invention from earlier Chinese and Korean printing, most scholars cite the introduction of the font: the set of unique
steel master letters, called punches, used to strike matrices, from which lead letters, or types, were cast in large numbers using an adjustable mould. This underlying multiplicative process, not of printed pages but of metal types, was at the core of typography in the West until the twentieth century."

Perhaps I'll find the time to get Temple's book tomorrow, but I doubt that I will find compelling evidence in there. We'll see...

you said there wasn't any difference in a baby thrown over the cliff and a baby burned to death. Maybe, but only if the deaths are instantaneous. I would say that being tortured to death, Nanjing/Unit 731 style is much worse than say, being killed in a blast of gunfire.

I don't remember the context in which I said this, but I'm pretty sure I meant that the consideration as a crime is the same. The effects on the victim vary obviously. But if you want to follow that road, you'd have to do it thoroughly & differentiate not only between torture & killing, but also between different kinds of torture, length of agony ASO.

I go the easy way: murder is murder. The judges have to consider the degree of malice aforethought for their sentence, but I'm not a judge.

[bossel]

Well, I finally got around to borrow it. It doesn't seem as bad as I thought it was (at least not as bad as Menzies' stuff). Yet, as expected, there is no real evidence shown for Gutenberg to have got his idea from China.

Even about block printing, Temple says that "although no hard evidence exists for its transmission from China, the circumstantial evidence is strong enough to support it."

For movable type he quotes a certain Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza: "whereby it is evident that manie years after that they had the use thereof [printing], it was brought into Almaine by the way of Ruscia and Moscouia, from whence, as it is certaine, they may come by lande, and that some merchants that came from Arabia Felix, might bring some books, from whence this John Cutembergo, whom the histories dooth make author, had his first foundation. [sic]"

So, Temple uses the speculation of a guy who wrote more than 100 years after the facts (Mendoza's book is from 1585) as evidence for his point. Pretty poor.