genocide

further reading in my chimp book gives an account of diamond's take on genocide.
apparently in the mid-1600s, tasmania was found by europeans.
by the mid-1800s, all native inhabitants were dead.
200 years to kill 50,000 years of however-many generations of people isolated from the rest of the world.

i guess the same can be said about soon-to-be-extinct animal species.
it just sux to realize that a culture that formed for that long could be lost that quickly without study or any written record of its idiosyncrasies.

diamond also made a genocide list of before the european expansion, from that point in time until 1900, then 1900-1950, and finally 1950-1990.
color and religion seem to spawn a lot of conflict, but i guess it still all comes down to control of land or control of people on your land.
native americans, africans, and aboriginies got their asses kicked for centuries.
jews too, were always getting raped.
it seems that temperate environments keep having more and more lighter-skinned people killing those with dark skins who inhabit that environment.
the russians seemed to have a lot of genocidal tendencies.
but it seemed to be more to control the people than for racial hatred.
well... sometimes.

its also funny how in one decade, the Tutsi are getting killed by the Hutu of Rwanda, and in the next decade, the 1970s, the Burundian Tutsis are now doing the killing on the Hutu.
the same goes for the Croatians and Serbs.

a little bit of power shift and the killed has no remorse in killing the killer.
but i guess that's retaliation for ya.
when there's only so much land in the world, and political boundaries to make matters worse, something's gotta go....