9 ms·

The thing that consistently blows my mind is that by the time we were getting around to building things in the middle east, Aborigines in Australia had been goi

The thing that consistently blows my mind is that by the time we were getting around to building things in the middle east, Aborigines in Australia had been going back to the same hunting camp for 40,000 years. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-50000-year-old-human-settlements-in-australian-interior/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/first-discovery-of-5...

xg15 8y ago
I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years. Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time. Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers. Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers. Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers. Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.
- irrational 8y ago
  Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > Why the stagnation for so long? Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.
    - irrational 8y ago
      But that doesn't explain why. For tens of thousands of years the people would have been as intelligent as any of us. Surely in all those years an Einstein would have been born who would push things forward much faster.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        "An Einstein" could not exist without first there being "a Newton", "a Leibniz", "a Pythagoras", "an Aristotle", etc. There are no geniuses that could single-handedly propel us from stone age to modern physics. It was all small steps, accumulated incrementally. (My current belief is that most of those figures I mentioned, and other famous scientists, weren't that much smarter than average - they were just the first to familiarize themselves with existing knowledge and make the next small step. This explains why so many discoveries were made simultaneously, within months or years, by different people who weren't in contact - it's because when a critical mass of knowledge is accumulated, the next step is obvious for a sufficiently educated/equipped person.) As for whether we could have had all the inventions add up a little bit quicker - maybe. Politics and economies in the past could look different. If Rome didn't fall, maybe we'd already be colonizing the moons of Saturn. Or maybe we'd only be witnessing the first "horseless carriage" now.
      - jballanc 8y ago
        Knowledge builds on knowledge, and (so far as we know) there's no shortcut to the gradual acquisition of knowledge. I think this is best exemplified by one particular episode of the YouTube "Primitive Technology" series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE . In this video, the creator builds a forge blower from sticks, leaves, stones, and vines. All materials that would've been available to primitive man 40,000 years (or more) ago... ...but the forge blower wasn't known to human kind until the 1600s! In other words, the creator of the "Primitive Technology" videos was able to build a forge blower because he knew about the concept (and, presumably, the principles of pressure and centrifugal force that make it all work). Those had to be discovered through thousands of years of an arduous process of trial, error, analysis, and teaching. So, the Einstein of 40,000 years ago likely existed, but he may have only been able to discover and convince others to, say, pre-burn wood to generate charcoal. In terms of an advancement over existing technology, I'd argue such an advance would be even more significant than General Relativity, and yet it's technology that we can run down to the corner store and procure for $5 a bag today.
  - zaphod4prez 8y ago
    I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life. Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > What's wrong with a system at equilibrium? Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.
      - stareatgoats 8y ago
        > For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
        abdullahkhalids 8y ago
        Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?" Can you fill that blank? I can't. Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    It only appears like stagnation when you look at history because the fruits of their civilization was systematically eradicated by conquerors. See for example the Nagualism tradition which was equally as developed as Vedic philosophy. But its teachers were all slaughtered and its books burned by the Catholic Church. By the 20th century “nagual” has become a slur. Now we look back and say memo-Americans were primitive and did nothing for tens of thousands of years: No, they were far more advanced than Europeans, but their knowledge was dangerous to the colonial mission and therefore expunged from history.
    - marcus_holmes 8y ago
      Yes! I always wonder about how far this goes... Humans from 100,000 years ago were basically like us. Our oldest history goes back maybe 15,000 of those years. Australian Aboriginal history, the longest I'm aware of, goes back less than half of that. We know that humans travelled over the Pacific, traded between South America And North Africa, for example. But because we don't have any artifacts from those periods we assume that this was haphazard and random rather than deliberate and organised. But artifacts just don't survive this long. So we have no idea what kind of societies were around 75,000 years ago. They could have discovered iron and made iron tools or weapons. But iron tools will completely disintegrate in 75,000 year, while stone ones won't. So we only see the stone tools, and assume they only had stone tools. It's interesting to speculate, but as there's no evidence (nor can there be) it'll remain an interesting speculation until we invest time travel.
      - erikpukinskis 8y ago
        Well, I have realized there’s more evidence than I thought. Oral traditions are not that easy to stamp out. It is all underground now though. And certainly not readily accessible to the Academy, given that it is a fundamentally colonial institution.
        marcus_holmes 8y ago
        Yeah, but "oral history" is only evidence that the history exists now. Not that it existed 10,000, 1,000 or even 10 years ago. The poster child for this is the druids in the UK. The Romans went on a deliberate campaign to destroy the druids. They documented it in their written histories, culminating in the invasion of the holy island of Anglesea. They stamped the whole religion out thoroughly. They had ~400 years to do that. Then there was ~1000 years of Christianity, not at all tolerant of other faiths. Then there was the Victorians, who were really, really keen on the occult and ancient knowledge. And suddenly an ancient oral tradition of druidism pops up. Convenient. I know there are oral histories that are sacred to Australian indigenous peoples, and I don't doubt for a second that they are true, but I'm always wary of trusting them.
  - CapitalistCartr 8y ago
    Mostly, it was probably climate: the last (current) Ice Age, the "Quaternary glaciation" took a breather about 15kya. Things warmed nicely for about two millennia, then the Younger Dryas, a cold spell of about a millennium, ended about 11-12 kya. Before this, the "Last Glacial Maximum" (just what it sounds like) was glacier city. Ice was maxed ~26,500 years ago, ending 16-13kya, depending on whom you talk to. Even far from the ice, the climate was radically different from today. Along with the serious climate swings, our culture changed. How much is straight-up the result of less ice is debatable, (I don't want to sound like Jared Diamond), but the fact remains: glaciers went, we developed agriculture. And we've been on the treadmill ever since.
  - analog31 8y ago
    Moreover, there were no jobs for theoretical physics professors back then either. ;-)
  - qubax 8y ago
    > Why the stagnation for so long? Because it tooks us a long time to understand and harness energy. To go from primarily human energy only to external energy. For example, the ability to turn a barrel of oil into work changed the game. People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil. Human civilization and progress seems to be directly related to energy use. What separated the US from britain and europe was our endless supply of oil. It isn't an accident that the wealthiest man and the most valuable company of the 19th century was Rockefeller of Standard Oil. Oil unleashed an enormous amount of energy that facilitated pretty much all of modern civilization - including the stupendous rise in population.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil. Oil gave us a lot of qualitative improvements, but the game-changer was still the steam engine. A way of turning external energy into work, be it wood, coal or oil. With that figured out, we've quickly moved through increasingly energy-dense fuels.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Inventing new things is really, really hard. Just think about how you would invent bow and arrow. You would first have to come across the concept of hurling pointy objects. You'd need strings. You'd have to notice that a taut string can be used to shoot pointy objects. And then you'd have to refine the concept until it works better than just throwing a spear yourself. Especially the last step is really difficult. Spears are very effective weapons, especially if you use a spear-thrower. And if you haven't invented writing yet, more likely than not anything you invent will be lost when you or perhaps your clan die. Even if you have writing, without the printing press and general education, more likely than not the person who could use your invention to build something better will never have heard about your work. Communication and trade was extremely slow until the invention of the telegraph basically, and regional disasters like drought could wipe out a lot of knowledge. Think how much progress was lost when the library in Alexandria burnt down.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Replying again (waaay past the edit window) with another thing. Today I wanted to watch something while eating my breakfast, and recalled the 1978 "Connections" series[0], I've seen recommended on HN many times. I ended up binging first two episodes, and the second one[1] is quite relevant to your question. It tells a story of how discovery of a particular stone in ancient times, that allowed people to set a standard on precious metals, started a chain of discoveries and transformations that culminated in (spoiler, rot13) gur vairagvba bs enqne naq gur ngbzvp obzo. Of course, technologies have a dependency tree, not chain, but watching this episode you can get a feeling of how one invention enabled another, how all the pieces for a new breakthrough might be there, but the economics are not right yet to have them used, and how the accumulation of knowledge accelerated over time. I highly recommend the episode, and judging by the first two, the whole series. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... [1] - you can find it on dailymotion dot com slash video slash x2gohd2
fit2rule 8y ago
Want more mind-blow? Consider this: the oral tradition of the Aborigines in Australia has been scientifically confirmed to extend back to 70,000 years. We, the modern era, can hardly keep our oral traditions going for a 100 years. Another fascinating fact: they did this, by fundamentally using a form of signed key - stories (oral traditions) were to be told in multiple languages; the language of ones own tribe, and of the tribe to which you journey. Only if those stories could be told in the same languages, were they persisted .. I honestly think one of the biggest travesties of the modern era is that we ever considered such cultures 'inferior' to our own. They even had a version of the Hippocratic oath way before us .. we had 'miasma theory', they knew already about the antiseptic nature of plants .. they've operated the longest-still-operational mine in human history .. its just staggering.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  much younger, by comparison, but my favorite "early checksum" example is the Torah. Since every glyph in hebrew has a numerical value, the sum of all rows and the sum of all columns of a page can be computed. When making a copy, if these values don't match the master, that page is cut out and burned. There's been an effectively zero error rate in copies of the Torah for the last ~3,000 years.
  - genericone 8y ago
    I did not know about this, so this is why the Jewish people can have good certainty about how far the origins of their religion indeed go. Very fascinating stuff, I learned something new today.
    - hprotagonist 8y ago
      with occasional empirical evidence, no less: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrol...
    - opportune 8y ago
      Well, the error rate since the written Torah was written may be low, but the Torah was already describing events that had occurred hundreds or even thousands of years before

xg15 8y ago

I remember having read something similar a while ago about a cave in France which was used a sort of natural paint supply over a time of around 10,000 years. Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time. Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers. Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers. Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers. Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.

irrational 8y ago
Yet, as far as I understand, if you took an infant and brought it forward to our time it could grow up to be a theoretical physics professor. That is, they were no different than us. Why the stagnation for so long?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Why the stagnation for so long? Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.
  - irrational 8y ago
    But that doesn't explain why. For tens of thousands of years the people would have been as intelligent as any of us. Surely in all those years an Einstein would have been born who would push things forward much faster.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      "An Einstein" could not exist without first there being "a Newton", "a Leibniz", "a Pythagoras", "an Aristotle", etc. There are no geniuses that could single-handedly propel us from stone age to modern physics. It was all small steps, accumulated incrementally. (My current belief is that most of those figures I mentioned, and other famous scientists, weren't that much smarter than average - they were just the first to familiarize themselves with existing knowledge and make the next small step. This explains why so many discoveries were made simultaneously, within months or years, by different people who weren't in contact - it's because when a critical mass of knowledge is accumulated, the next step is obvious for a sufficiently educated/equipped person.) As for whether we could have had all the inventions add up a little bit quicker - maybe. Politics and economies in the past could look different. If Rome didn't fall, maybe we'd already be colonizing the moons of Saturn. Or maybe we'd only be witnessing the first "horseless carriage" now.
    - jballanc 8y ago
      Knowledge builds on knowledge, and (so far as we know) there's no shortcut to the gradual acquisition of knowledge. I think this is best exemplified by one particular episode of the YouTube "Primitive Technology" series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE . In this video, the creator builds a forge blower from sticks, leaves, stones, and vines. All materials that would've been available to primitive man 40,000 years (or more) ago... ...but the forge blower wasn't known to human kind until the 1600s! In other words, the creator of the "Primitive Technology" videos was able to build a forge blower because he knew about the concept (and, presumably, the principles of pressure and centrifugal force that make it all work). Those had to be discovered through thousands of years of an arduous process of trial, error, analysis, and teaching. So, the Einstein of 40,000 years ago likely existed, but he may have only been able to discover and convince others to, say, pre-burn wood to generate charcoal. In terms of an advancement over existing technology, I'd argue such an advance would be even more significant than General Relativity, and yet it's technology that we can run down to the corner store and procure for $5 a bag today.
- zaphod4prez 8y ago
  I notice that you use the word "stagnation" here, which definitely has a negative subtext. Most people probably feel that same negativity towards the thought of that long period of slow change / stability. I wonder, however, whether that subtext is appropriate. Perhaps they were happy with their lives? Maybe there were no changes because we'd reached an equilibrium, and people were happy enough that no one did anything radical that would change their way of life. Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > What's wrong with a system at equilibrium? Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.
    - stareatgoats 8y ago
      > For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death. For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
      - abdullahkhalids 8y ago
        Lets flip the desirability question. Imagine we invent fast space travel and go out there and meet a smart alien species. Evolution for these aliens has given them an extremely robust bodies and, say, ten million years ago these aliens stopped dying or getting seriously ill. You say to them, "This is not the way to live. Its a much better life if after 100 years every individual self-destructs because XYZ?" Can you fill that blank? I can't. Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  It only appears like stagnation when you look at history because the fruits of their civilization was systematically eradicated by conquerors. See for example the Nagualism tradition which was equally as developed as Vedic philosophy. But its teachers were all slaughtered and its books burned by the Catholic Church. By the 20th century “nagual” has become a slur. Now we look back and say memo-Americans were primitive and did nothing for tens of thousands of years: No, they were far more advanced than Europeans, but their knowledge was dangerous to the colonial mission and therefore expunged from history.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    Yes! I always wonder about how far this goes... Humans from 100,000 years ago were basically like us. Our oldest history goes back maybe 15,000 of those years. Australian Aboriginal history, the longest I'm aware of, goes back less than half of that. We know that humans travelled over the Pacific, traded between South America And North Africa, for example. But because we don't have any artifacts from those periods we assume that this was haphazard and random rather than deliberate and organised. But artifacts just don't survive this long. So we have no idea what kind of societies were around 75,000 years ago. They could have discovered iron and made iron tools or weapons. But iron tools will completely disintegrate in 75,000 year, while stone ones won't. So we only see the stone tools, and assume they only had stone tools. It's interesting to speculate, but as there's no evidence (nor can there be) it'll remain an interesting speculation until we invest time travel.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      Well, I have realized there’s more evidence than I thought. Oral traditions are not that easy to stamp out. It is all underground now though. And certainly not readily accessible to the Academy, given that it is a fundamentally colonial institution.
      - marcus_holmes 8y ago
        Yeah, but "oral history" is only evidence that the history exists now. Not that it existed 10,000, 1,000 or even 10 years ago. The poster child for this is the druids in the UK. The Romans went on a deliberate campaign to destroy the druids. They documented it in their written histories, culminating in the invasion of the holy island of Anglesea. They stamped the whole religion out thoroughly. They had ~400 years to do that. Then there was ~1000 years of Christianity, not at all tolerant of other faiths. Then there was the Victorians, who were really, really keen on the occult and ancient knowledge. And suddenly an ancient oral tradition of druidism pops up. Convenient. I know there are oral histories that are sacred to Australian indigenous peoples, and I don't doubt for a second that they are true, but I'm always wary of trusting them.
- CapitalistCartr 8y ago
  Mostly, it was probably climate: the last (current) Ice Age, the "Quaternary glaciation" took a breather about 15kya. Things warmed nicely for about two millennia, then the Younger Dryas, a cold spell of about a millennium, ended about 11-12 kya. Before this, the "Last Glacial Maximum" (just what it sounds like) was glacier city. Ice was maxed ~26,500 years ago, ending 16-13kya, depending on whom you talk to. Even far from the ice, the climate was radically different from today. Along with the serious climate swings, our culture changed. How much is straight-up the result of less ice is debatable, (I don't want to sound like Jared Diamond), but the fact remains: glaciers went, we developed agriculture. And we've been on the treadmill ever since.
- analog31 8y ago
  Moreover, there were no jobs for theoretical physics professors back then either. ;-)
- qubax 8y ago
  > Why the stagnation for so long? Because it tooks us a long time to understand and harness energy. To go from primarily human energy only to external energy. For example, the ability to turn a barrel of oil into work changed the game. People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil. Human civilization and progress seems to be directly related to energy use. What separated the US from britain and europe was our endless supply of oil. It isn't an accident that the wealthiest man and the most valuable company of the 19th century was Rockefeller of Standard Oil. Oil unleashed an enormous amount of energy that facilitated pretty much all of modern civilization - including the stupendous rise in population.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil. Oil gave us a lot of qualitative improvements, but the game-changer was still the steam engine. A way of turning external energy into work, be it wood, coal or oil. With that figured out, we've quickly moved through increasingly energy-dense fuels.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Inventing new things is really, really hard. Just think about how you would invent bow and arrow. You would first have to come across the concept of hurling pointy objects. You'd need strings. You'd have to notice that a taut string can be used to shoot pointy objects. And then you'd have to refine the concept until it works better than just throwing a spear yourself. Especially the last step is really difficult. Spears are very effective weapons, especially if you use a spear-thrower. And if you haven't invented writing yet, more likely than not anything you invent will be lost when you or perhaps your clan die. Even if you have writing, without the printing press and general education, more likely than not the person who could use your invention to build something better will never have heard about your work. Communication and trade was extremely slow until the invention of the telegraph basically, and regional disasters like drought could wipe out a lot of knowledge. Think how much progress was lost when the library in Alexandria burnt down.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Replying again (waaay past the edit window) with another thing. Today I wanted to watch something while eating my breakfast, and recalled the 1978 "Connections" series[0], I've seen recommended on HN many times. I ended up binging first two episodes, and the second one[1] is quite relevant to your question. It tells a story of how discovery of a particular stone in ancient times, that allowed people to set a standard on precious metals, started a chain of discoveries and transformations that culminated in (spoiler, rot13) gur vairagvba bs enqne naq gur ngbzvp obzo. Of course, technologies have a dependency tree, not chain, but watching this episode you can get a feeling of how one invention enabled another, how all the pieces for a new breakthrough might be there, but the economics are not right yet to have them used, and how the accumulation of knowledge accelerated over time. I highly recommend the episode, and judging by the first two, the whole series. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec... [1] - you can find it on dailymotion dot com slash video slash x2gohd2

fit2rule 8y ago

Want more mind-blow? Consider this: the oral tradition of the Aborigines in Australia has been scientifically confirmed to extend back to 70,000 years. We, the modern era, can hardly keep our oral traditions going for a 100 years. Another fascinating fact: they did this, by fundamentally using a form of signed key - stories (oral traditions) were to be told in multiple languages; the language of ones own tribe, and of the tribe to which you journey. Only if those stories could be told in the same languages, were they persisted .. I honestly think one of the biggest travesties of the modern era is that we ever considered such cultures 'inferior' to our own. They even had a version of the Hippocratic oath way before us .. we had 'miasma theory', they knew already about the antiseptic nature of plants .. they've operated the longest-still-operational mine in human history .. its just staggering.

hprotagonist 8y ago
much younger, by comparison, but my favorite "early checksum" example is the Torah. Since every glyph in hebrew has a numerical value, the sum of all rows and the sum of all columns of a page can be computed. When making a copy, if these values don't match the master, that page is cut out and burned. There's been an effectively zero error rate in copies of the Torah for the last ~3,000 years.
- genericone 8y ago
  I did not know about this, so this is why the Jewish people can have good certainty about how far the origins of their religion indeed go. Very fascinating stuff, I learned something new today.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    with occasional empirical evidence, no less: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrolls-bible.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-sea-scrol...
  - opportune 8y ago
    Well, the error rate since the written Torah was written may be low, but the Torah was already describing events that had occurred hundreds or even thousands of years before