The way I understood it they didn’t give up ALL technology. On screen they didn’t give up their advanced clothing and binoculars. I doubt they gave up their medicine and guns among other things. But the tech they didn’t give up would break down or run out over a relatively shore period of time. So they’d have an advantage for awhile, teach the primitives some things, speech was specifically mentioned and they would breed with them to form a slightly more advanced race than when they got there.
Also, given their sparse population of around 38K, I guess it’s not even much of a choice that they’ll have to give up most of the technology, if they want to procreate with the tribesmen. Any kind of crazy technology might scare them away, and I can see why the fleet went along with it to preserve humanity (or cylonity).
But, I can totally see them hanging onto some of the cooler equipment, which could be the construct of multiple religions on Earth. Someone with meds would become the magical healer (like Jesus), at least to the tribesmen. Or if someone kept a raptor, that could be perceived as someone flying/UFOs/etc. Even someone with a pair of lame glasses could be perceived as someone with a gift of curing eyesight or a magical fire starter person, because the tribesmen don’t understand the science of it yet. (Though, how the heck did they explain having hundreds of people that just happen to look exactly like one another? How did the 2s, the 6s and the 8s live with the tribesmen?)
So, to follow the history of men in real life, perhaps the sparse technology that the fleet did keep wasn’t taught to the tribesmen as science, but became the remnants of ancient religions and storytelling and whatnots instead?
Sorry for rambling. It’s late, and I need sleep, even though I’m still reeling over the finale.
I have a degree in molecular biology so I don’t feel the need to go to talk origins, and, yes, there is always a “mtEve”. In our history, however, the recent date for that mtEve also, in my not ignorant opinion, involves a population bottleneck. It’s not an accident that there is so little genetic variation among modern humans compared to other living primate species. I suspect you are getting hung up on my use of bottleneck and ascribing a misunderstanding about the hypothesis I don’t have, so how bout we just go with the show, and there we get a scenario postulating, at best a few hundred females with this particular mtDNA genotype versus potentially tens of thousands of different mtDNA lineages concurrently extant at the time of the finale. To reach the modern world with Hera’s mtDNA genotype the only ancestral form in the face of that you’d either be looking at exceedingly lucky interbreeding or a later population crash where only the human-cylon hybrid descendents possessed the necessary stuff to get through it.
I don’t believe that the writers had any idea what the term Mitochondrial Eve actually meant, they just thought it sounded cool and fit in with the quasi-religious tone they wanted to establish.
Bingo, hence my problem. It’s not that I can’t buy the Australia and Asia colonial seedings dying out within a generation or two - the finale as much as set up that possibility - or that I can’t buy the chain of events that give us Hera (and possibly other human-cylon hybrids) as the sole progenitors of modern humanity, it’s that I think if you understand the implications of this you don’t get a better story, you get a substantially weaker one:
After four years of following and investing in these characters, their mythology, their struggles, their triumpsh, their tragedies, etc., we get to a point where, basically, the story tells us it didn’t matter much since just about nobody’s gene lines survive anyhow. Yes, this is exactly what population biology is about, it is reality, and it’s even sort of cool in a “damn we live in a harsh universe” sort of way, but it also brings in a bit of trivializing to what we’ve just all watched.
I understand your point, but I don’t think I agree. At the VERY LEAST, these characters we fell in love with are responsible for our existence as a species–if Hera had not made it to (our) Earth, and if only Cylon/Human hybrids could have survived, then where would we be? I wouldn’t call that trivial. And I think many of the characters would be passing on their DNA anyway. Maybe Baltar and Six would’ve ended up with a family (I smell a sitcom). But in the end, this show was always about the journey, not the destination.
Real question, Phil. I know just enough history to be dangerous to myself and others. It’s pretty well known that in the past 200 years or so “we” have grown in height and weight - to a signficant degree. Is that a long, long term process or as a result of “us” shrinking due, say, to The Industrial Revolution (crappier diet, living conditions, etc. - all things being relative).
Stephen Ambrose somewhat famously reflected on this in one of his books about WWII by discussing that one reason (one reason, OK?) the Allies prevailed was that the American soldiers were “bigger” and “healthier” - as a rule - than the Germans and the Japanese.
If we were to get into The Way Back Machine and visit Ancient Greece for example, how would the population of Athens compare in size on average to us?
Well said. a/k/a The Lords of Kobol Syndrome.
That holds together quite well.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty darn impressive.
Wait. What were we talking about?
You and me both, pal.
Good question OT! There are data that show the average height of postwar Japanese were a couple of cm taller than their parents’ generation. This is due to improvement of diet, but part of the problem was poor diet quality in Imperial Japan. Also, in the archeological record the skeletons of people from hunter gather societies can be healthier than those in horticultural societies whose diets typically rely on calorie rich but nutrient poor starches (maize, taro, etc.). So yes, many of the early modern humans, particularly in warmer Africa could have been quite large. Even at 1.5 million years ago there’s a skeleton of a Homo erectus suggesting adults could be pushing 6 feet tall.
The vast majority of people living in any type of early nation state probably actually had a pretty crappy diet of easy calories, but poor nutrients. So I would suspect you average Greek back in the day would be smaller that their actual human potential. The upper class on the other hand probably lived pretty large…
The upper class on the other hand probably lived pretty large…
Sort of the AIG senior management of their time.
OT, Rim shot, big laugh, Applause Applause Applause 
In just rewatching the episode the Heads 6 and Baltar refer to a “young woman” being found, so if it actually was Hera, she could have had children.
Anyway, such a popular article would actually make the claim of having found ME just be finding a female skeleton with modern human morphology at approximately the time ME is predicted to occur based on modern human divergence times…
Kind of, but the upper class Greeks really probably were the best and brightest of their time…
OK ya know what I am not truly satisfied because basically it does not make sense. I mean I understand wanting a whole clean slate but…the smarter thing would be to dismantle all of the ships and use the supplies. Also ya know to pass down the story of their travels as to avoid pass mistakes. They could make it vague but just ignoring it doesn’t make sense. I mean Lee says they would give the Earth Humans the best part of humanity, but we’ve always had the best part and look where it got them. What made him think it could be avoided particularly by avoiding their tale.
Also we know Gaelan ended up in like Ireland or something…Gaelan=Gaelic. So he must have had children or have encountered humans.
The funny thing is Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan must be descendants of cylons:D
Nice touch, I haven’t thought of that 
I had always assumed the name Galen is related to the famous Roman physician and not the Gaels. And Tyrol would seem to come from a place name around Italy/Switzerland.
But anyway, I don’t think it’s likely they’d abandon all their technology either. When Baltar and Six set off to start farming…where were they going to sleep? What tools were they going to farm with? What was for dinner that night? A thousand logical questions we’re all asking.
If you think a single name lasts 150,000 years, with no written culture for 140,000+ years of that time. Right.
No. The names mean NOTHING. The ‘connections’ to Greco-Roman and other culture (ties, Shakespearean quotes, whatever) mean NOTHING.
They are, and always have been, dramatic devices in BSG. Nothing more. Fans can read into names, mythologies, etc what they want, but the final scenes prove it has no bearing on our current world.
Just like other dramatic devices: sounds in space, up/down conventions, language, music, cultural references, etc. WE would have no context for our understanding without these references.
The (admittedly absurd) ‘150,000 years in our past’ idea at least buries all this nonsense.
Me too OT, me too. I keep asking my girlfriend if Im crazy for having this anxiety over the ending on the show. It keeps hitting me in waves as if I am in mourning.
I was think this same thing. Had they used the ship parts to make camps and buildings (doesnt have to be cities) RDM could have played the fleet crews into more Earth legends and histories such as Atlantis and Noah’s Ark and others. Imagine crashing one of the ships on or near an Island in the Atlantic ocean and using it as a city and calling it Atlantis. I dunno, its just an idea. Personally I still wish they hadnt even told us for sure if the 2nd Earth was our Earth.
Well he describes that they are going to drop him off in one of those places not Rome, so…