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Really neat to see these.. just reminds me how humans have been intelligent for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years.. we just didn't have advanced techn

Really neat to see these.. just reminds me how humans have been intelligent for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years.. we just didn't have advanced technology or large numbers until recently. We had to work with the little accumulated knowledge we had.

ekianjo 10y ago
> we just didn't have advanced technology Mastering Fire, Steel were already what I would call advanced technologies. We should not belittle what people were capable of with the means that they had. And the knowledge even back in antiquity was abundant - look at the work done by the Greek scientists, it's amazing what they knew with the limited observation tools they had.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Fire and steel are rather different cases. Steel required some form of highly organized collective arrangement, to procure the needed materials and perform the labor necessary to obtain the end result. This pretty much implies a fairly well-developed society, which is probably why the earliest steel artifacts we know of are only a few thousand years old. Fire, on the other hand, is about learning to control, and eventually propagate, a natural phenomenon. Human ancestors have done so a very long time ago - by some estimates, more than a million years ago (thus significantly predating anatomically and behaviorally modern humans).
aaron695 10y ago
I think hard work and organisation (possibly slaves?) is more what it was.
nkrisc 10y ago
People seem to think sometimes that ancient humans were dumb because they didn't have smartphones. No, they were as smart us, they only lacked knowledge, not intelligence.
- cooper12 10y ago
  They had knowledge too, just in other areas. They would probably look down on modern humans for not knowing how to skin a deer or how to rotate crops.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    Many modern humans have that knowledge. It's not really inaccessible to anyone reading HN.
    - dualogy 10y ago
      As long as the grid and Youtube still runs! /prepper voice off
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Reading how to skin an animal and actually doing it are quite different things. Then you need to know that you need to know how to handle the skins to make anything useful with them.
  - zubairq 10y ago
    Great observation, I totally agree! :)
  - nkrisc 10y ago
    I didn't mean to imply they had no knowledge, just they lacked most of the knowledge we take for granted. That knowledge itself was accumulated by many generations of people.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 10y ago
  Depends on how ancient, though. Behaviorally modern humans only appear about ~50k years ago.
- arethuza 10y ago
dualogy 10y ago
> just reminds me how humans have been intelligent for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years In terms of brain size, IIRC our brains were largest ~90k years ago, remained that size for ~60k years, incurred a slight shrinkage over ~20k years, then shrinkage quickened markedly since ~10k years ago (Ruff CB, et al. Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo, Nature 1997; 387: 173-176). Of course, brain size /= intelligence or even brain efficiency. Hard to define intelligence anyway. Still a remarkable change to ponder.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  I wonder if the higher temperatures of holocene have something to do with it? The brain might be temperature limited in some cases?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I imagine its part of the 'civilization' package. More fuel-efficient, maturing to a more juvenile form, less aggressive, and more specialized brain? In a community you only have to learn a few specialized tasks, instead of needing to have all the skills?
  - dualogy 10y ago
    More fuel-efficient thanks to 'civilization'? Not sure I follow, what do you mean by that?
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Living in a dense village/town/city its important to be efficient especially with food. Its the fundamental limit on scaling. We don't all have to be warriors. Some sit and make clay pots or weave. A smaller, fuel-efficient model of citizen is a great advantage to a society.
pmyjavec 10y ago
Excellent point; however, I would argue they had all the technology they needed. I've thought about this long an hard for a while after spending time in an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia. A friend of mine explained to me that these people weren't primitives (as considered by some) but rather a highly advanced civilization in which we in the west only slightly understands. He was right. The lessons I learned there have been burned into my mind and I'm grateful for my experience. This has made me wonder if "modern civilization" took a wrong turn at some point. Clearly we need to back track a little in order to survive. Australian Aboriginals amongst other great things were: - Masters of using fire to manage the land (fire stick farming) - Discovered the hydrofoil (boomerangs). - Astronomers (the night sky in outback Australia beats any television show) - Built throwing tools that were highly efficient (woomera) - Lived sustainably (something we're only just realising needs to be done) - Made sure everyone in society had a place (totems). - Implemented important laws to govern the size of the population. - They lived in peace and harmony with the land. Sure they didn't have any cannons and guns, atomic bombs or rocket ships, but they didn't have much of the transmittable diseases and mass scale wars and climate change we have now, nor did they initiate the collapse of the eco-system. Unfortunately certain people thought it was a good idea to try destroy these incredible people and their culture. Thank god they didn't succeed in entirely, because we still have much to learn from them.
- int_19h 10y ago
  I can't speak of Australian Aborigines specifically, but in general, it's not true that primitive tribes are some kind of pacifist pastoralists. Sure, they don't wage large-scale wars - because they don't have the population numbers for that. But they do use violence against each other a lot, and when you adjust it per capita, it's quite on par with "civilized" wars, and even exceeds them sometimes. "Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.”" (GG&S)

ekianjo 10y ago

> we just didn't have advanced technology Mastering Fire, Steel were already what I would call advanced technologies. We should not belittle what people were capable of with the means that they had. And the knowledge even back in antiquity was abundant - look at the work done by the Greek scientists, it's amazing what they knew with the limited observation tools they had.

int_19h 10y ago
Fire and steel are rather different cases. Steel required some form of highly organized collective arrangement, to procure the needed materials and perform the labor necessary to obtain the end result. This pretty much implies a fairly well-developed society, which is probably why the earliest steel artifacts we know of are only a few thousand years old. Fire, on the other hand, is about learning to control, and eventually propagate, a natural phenomenon. Human ancestors have done so a very long time ago - by some estimates, more than a million years ago (thus significantly predating anatomically and behaviorally modern humans).

aaron695 10y ago

I think hard work and organisation (possibly slaves?) is more what it was.

nkrisc 10y ago

People seem to think sometimes that ancient humans were dumb because they didn't have smartphones. No, they were as smart us, they only lacked knowledge, not intelligence.

cooper12 10y ago
They had knowledge too, just in other areas. They would probably look down on modern humans for not knowing how to skin a deer or how to rotate crops.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Many modern humans have that knowledge. It's not really inaccessible to anyone reading HN.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    As long as the grid and Youtube still runs! /prepper voice off
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Reading how to skin an animal and actually doing it are quite different things. Then you need to know that you need to know how to handle the skins to make anything useful with them.
- zubairq 10y ago
  Great observation, I totally agree! :)
- nkrisc 10y ago
  I didn't mean to imply they had no knowledge, just they lacked most of the knowledge we take for granted. That knowledge itself was accumulated by many generations of people.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
int_19h 10y ago
Depends on how ancient, though. Behaviorally modern humans only appear about ~50k years ago.
arethuza 10y ago

dualogy 10y ago

> just reminds me how humans have been intelligent for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years In terms of brain size, IIRC our brains were largest ~90k years ago, remained that size for ~60k years, incurred a slight shrinkage over ~20k years, then shrinkage quickened markedly since ~10k years ago (Ruff CB, et al. Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo, Nature 1997; 387: 173-176). Of course, brain size /= intelligence or even brain efficiency. Hard to define intelligence anyway. Still a remarkable change to ponder.

Gravityloss 10y ago
I wonder if the higher temperatures of holocene have something to do with it? The brain might be temperature limited in some cases?
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I imagine its part of the 'civilization' package. More fuel-efficient, maturing to a more juvenile form, less aggressive, and more specialized brain? In a community you only have to learn a few specialized tasks, instead of needing to have all the skills?
- dualogy 10y ago
  More fuel-efficient thanks to 'civilization'? Not sure I follow, what do you mean by that?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Living in a dense village/town/city its important to be efficient especially with food. Its the fundamental limit on scaling. We don't all have to be warriors. Some sit and make clay pots or weave. A smaller, fuel-efficient model of citizen is a great advantage to a society.

pmyjavec 10y ago

Excellent point; however, I would argue they had all the technology they needed. I've thought about this long an hard for a while after spending time in an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia. A friend of mine explained to me that these people weren't primitives (as considered by some) but rather a highly advanced civilization in which we in the west only slightly understands. He was right. The lessons I learned there have been burned into my mind and I'm grateful for my experience. This has made me wonder if "modern civilization" took a wrong turn at some point. Clearly we need to back track a little in order to survive. Australian Aboriginals amongst other great things were: - Masters of using fire to manage the land (fire stick farming) - Discovered the hydrofoil (boomerangs). - Astronomers (the night sky in outback Australia beats any television show) - Built throwing tools that were highly efficient (woomera) - Lived sustainably (something we're only just realising needs to be done) - Made sure everyone in society had a place (totems). - Implemented important laws to govern the size of the population. - They lived in peace and harmony with the land. Sure they didn't have any cannons and guns, atomic bombs or rocket ships, but they didn't have much of the transmittable diseases and mass scale wars and climate change we have now, nor did they initiate the collapse of the eco-system. Unfortunately certain people thought it was a good idea to try destroy these incredible people and their culture. Thank god they didn't succeed in entirely, because we still have much to learn from them.

int_19h 10y ago
I can't speak of Australian Aborigines specifically, but in general, it's not true that primitive tribes are some kind of pacifist pastoralists. Sure, they don't wage large-scale wars - because they don't have the population numbers for that. But they do use violence against each other a lot, and when you adjust it per capita, it's quite on par with "civilized" wars, and even exceeds them sometimes. "Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.”" (GG&S)