10 ms·

If humans has the same capacity for thought 100,000 years go as they have now, why didn't "modern civilization" develop earlier? Or rather, why didn't the catal

by lxe 7y ago

If humans has the same capacity for thought 100,000 years go as they have now, why didn't "modern civilization" develop earlier? Or rather, why didn't the catalysts for civilization: agriculture, language, writing, etc... happen earlier?

sneak 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) There is a theory that humans only developed consciousness in the last 2-3000 years, based on literary sources, and that we were sort of guided by what were in fact auditory hallucinations (generated by another, less connected part of our brains) before that time. Interesting idea.
- rladd 7y ago
  Is that a theory or more of a very weak hypothesis?
  - sneak 7y ago
    Of the idea, Richard Dawkins said: > “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; Nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.” Even if it’s totally wrong, it is an interesting thought experiment.
    - rladd 7y ago
      Yes, but a thought experiment is not a theory.
- ajuc 7y ago
  It's funny how modern psychology is so much like ancient philosophy of nature - assuming random things because it feels sensible and arguing about them using analogies and magical thinking.
dboreham 7y ago
The hardware is the same but the software had to be developed.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Just wait for the AI software to start designing hardware. (This is what might have actually happened in the case of the non-A I, when, say, the language triggered a step in the brain's physical evolution.)
lovecg 7y ago
Useful original thought is extremely rare. There had to be a very long accumulation of knowledge passed down through generations before a critical mass built up.
minikites 7y ago
Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than contemporary hunter gatherers. My hunch is that we spend a lot of time at local maximums until an outside force motivates us to go through a period of being worse off before becoming better off (after the negatives have been addressed and the positives refined).
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than contemporary hunter gatherers. I keep hearing this, and it's probably true in some sense. But agriculture is also an incredibly good deal, in that it now supports 7000 million human lives. H&G only reached about 50 million. So it becomes a philosophical question: Is it better to have a few happy people alive or a huge population of less happy ones? I'm reminded of the old "explorer's fallacy", where you encounter a tribe in the jungle and marvel at how healthy everyone is. Not realizing that the sick and infirm aren't allowed to live there.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    I don't know if it's a question of happiness, but instead it was probably one of necessity. H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly dispersed in nature. Agriculture gave man the ability to manifest abundance without necessarily depending on nature to provide. I think there are many studies on the overall health of hunter-gatherers as a result of diet and exercise and leisure time as demanded by the lifestyle. In early agricultural societies you have to work harder and longer and you're forced to eat a lot of bread, potatoes and corn and other low quality foods.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      Of course, you can only study the diets of the living. > H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly dispersed in nature. But... doesn't "numbers were kept in check" mean "surplus people starved to death"?
fpo 7y ago
Why should it have? Progress is always incremental. Even before civilization there were minute steps towards organization from just pure hunter-gatherer days. Just because the neolithic period started 12-15k years ago doesn't mean somebody woke up one day with a modern brain smart enough to plant things.
- abtinf 7y ago
  It took an Einstein of the time to figure out things could even be planted. It is a monumental achievement.
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Writing is also a far greater (/ less likely) achievement than many people realise. You need a language, enough social structure to create a demand for written instructions/messages beyond simple pictures, and an Einstein-level linguistic genius to figure out how to break down and codify language utterances in a way that can readily be learnt and understood by the general population. Some languages such as Guniyandi have only recently undergone this conversion [0], in fact there are likely thousands of languages still without writetn forms [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooniyandi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooniyandi [1] https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
    - iguy 7y ago
      But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states, it's part of what lets a king rule so many peasants that merely having his brothers remember who owes how much doesn't work anymore. Figuring out that it could be used to write sentences took a few millennia after that. And only after that came enough simplification for people other than palace/temple employees to learn it.
      - n4r9 7y ago
zozbot234 7y ago
> If humans has the same capacity for thought 100,000 years go as they have now, why didn't "modern civilization" develop earlier? Why do you assume that it didn't? There's plenty of emerging evidence that even foraging humans had a fairly complex social organization, with "proto-cities" that functioned as ceremonial centers at the very least. That's circumstantial evidence that they did have "civilization" of a sort, and perhaps even "modernity".
- distances 7y ago
  /r/AskHistorians has a several topics on this theme (if it's possible there are older civilizations we don't know about). The consensus is that it's very unlikely. E.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5yrmi/how_certain_are_we_that_the_first_civilizations/ejhb9p1/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5yrmi/how_c...
sgarrity 7y ago
While I'm not sure it goes back nearly as far as 100,000 years (it's been a while since I read it), the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel) does a compelling job of exploring why complex civilizations arose in some times and places and not in others. An aspect I found particularly interesting was the idea that basic physical geography could have played a strong role in determining when and where complex civilizations arose.
- henriquemaia 7y ago
  You might want to check this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2OQmvRUdr3U https://youtube.com/watch?v=2OQmvRUdr3U (title: African History Disproves “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond). tl;dw: that theory is not as valid as it may seem at first.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  An alternative view is "Triumph of the West" by Roberts. https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/0316749893 https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/031674989...
abtinf 7y ago
Man had to learn how to think, then acquire knowledge. This question is part of what inspired Harry Binswanger’s book, “How We Know”: “Mankind has existed for 400,000 years. But 395,000 of those years were consumed by the Stone Age. The factor that freed men from endless toil and early death, the root cause of the elevated level of existence we now take for granted, is one precious value: knowledge. The painfully acquired knowledge of how to master nature, how to organize social existence, and how to understand himself is what enabled man to rise from the cave to the skyscraper, from warring clans to a global economy, from an average lifespan of less than 30 years to one approaching 80.” http://www.how-we-know.com/ http://www.how-we-know.com/
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Hunter-gatherers who made it to age 25 were just as likely to live to their 60s as modern folks are today. The 30 year old average life expectancy of Neolithic man comes from two things: one, we cannot properly age skeletal fossils to a degree of certainty after wisdom teeth have fully grown in. You can't tell from a 10k year old fossil if it was a 30 year old or a 55 year old at time of death. Finally, infant mortality was extremely high and remained very high until modern medicine. These infant deaths decreased the average life expectancy but it masks the lifespan that healthy adults would typically experience.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Infections were a major cause of death, including in infants. Also starvation, violence and the elements. You can argue that those who survived infections, the elements, violence and starvation were in much better shape to survive everything else. Also contrary to popular belief, cardiovascular disease happened before modern times, and even if we might be talking of Neolithic only, this happened even in hunter gatherer populations. Found these pretty interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361360598X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2757994 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... In modern times what we have is much less violence, vaccines, antibiotics, a healthcare system capable of healing injuries or restore you after heart attacks, etc and in spite of prevailing beliefs we’ve got proper nutrition and at least in the industrialized countries we aren’t dying of starvation or nutritional deficiencies anymore. Our problem is “energy poisoning”. Once we figure out how to not eat so damn much, we’ll eliminate most chronic disease we have today.
robotomir 7y ago
The climate has been fairly stable over the last 10,000 years?
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Source?
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    It's called the Holocene period in geology, see below: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL084384 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
HBKXNCUO 7y ago
A bigger question would be: why did whatever selective process that resulted in our capacity for thought stop improving on it 100,000 years ago?
- pacaro 7y ago
  I'm assuming that as populations become larger (more successful?) that the selection process becomes more diffuse. It's clear that sub-populations have evolved or acquired useful traits (particularly dietary adaptations) in relatively short timescales. From TFA it appears that the original human population in Africa was pushed out of the interior by climate changes, it's not inconceivable that those conditions also provided evolutionary pressure
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > why did whatever selective process that resulted in our capacity for thought stop improving on it 100,000 years ago? Some people have posited that it's because some fundamental biological limits were run into. (Our biology has already made many compromises to support the large brain, such as extended childhood, compromises in women's skeletal structure, the large energy consumption of the brain, etc.)
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Why are we not developing technology right now that will be developed in the next 1000 years? Progress is incremental. One step after the other.
- awayfromhomenow 7y ago
  Until it's not. Until a pandemic wipes out an appreciable portion of your population, and causes a reversion, until a war does the same, or an asteroid, or low birth-rate. Progress isn't some irreversible, implacably forward-moving wave.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
Lots of tribal folks with modern minds did not develop like this. Aboriginals in Australia come to mind.
chrisco255 7y ago
My guess would be climate. 100K ago, humans were in the midst of the ice age and it lasted until about 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Holocene period. The early Holocene was actually warmer than modern temperatures, and it is said that even the Sahara was fertile in this time. As the ice age ended, rain patterns shifted and vegetation flourished. It probably then became possible to remain in one area for an extended period of time without roaming around in search of game and wild food, and you could actually support a larger tribe of people. Once that began to happen, people started learning and developing local culture, language, skill development, etc. and sharing that knowledge. For the same reason we see hubs of specialized labor in modern society (like Silicon Valley, Hollywood, New York financial district, etc), the first communities to develop agriculture were able to exploit those skills to improve techniques over time, and caused places like Mesopotamia and Egypt to develop and thrive over time. It appears as though Mesopotamia developed clay tablets with written language as an early form of contractual agreement rather than as a form of communication or literature.
cocomittens 7y ago
Because nowadays when a system is created (born) a basic package of the sum total of current knowledge is downloaded onto the system (school) with a vast array of optional packages one can choose from (books, college, etc). To add to the sum total of knowledge is a painstakingly long process in comparison (phd, r&d, innovation). But someone had to be the person to git init and make the first commit. Even if they had the same specs, they didn't have access to a 10k+ year old code base. If a modern person had grown up in ancient civilization, I guarantee they wouldn't be all that much more knowledgable than others of that time.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > If a modern person had grown up in ancient civilization, I guarantee they wouldn't be all that much more knowledgable than others of that time. If I was dropped into Roman times, what I'd invent is a printing press. After inventing paper made from rags.
maxlamb 7y ago
The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond pretty much answers this question, pretty convincingly to me at least. The book "Sapiens" does provide additional insight as well on this subject.
gshdg 7y ago
Population density.
WalterBright 7y ago
Human progress has followed an exponential curve. There's no evidence that intelligence has increased along with it. In order for the mind to conceive of something, first there must be the idea that it is possible. For example, in the 1970's lots of people wondered what a home computer would possibly be good for. The only things people could imagine were storing recipes and balancing one's checkbook. I'm not kidding.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carapace 7y ago
I suspect civilization as we know it is a post-traumatic response to the Younger Dryas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
TheCoelacanth 7y ago
Why presume that they wanted to develop civilization? Early civilization was superior to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in only one aspect: how large of a population it could support. In nearly every other way, it provided a worse lifestyle.

by lxe 7y ago

sneak 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) There is a theory that humans only developed consciousness in the last 2-3000 years, based on literary sources, and that we were sort of guided by what were in fact auditory hallucinations (generated by another, less connected part of our brains) before that time. Interesting idea.

rladd 7y ago
Is that a theory or more of a very weak hypothesis?
- sneak 7y ago
  Of the idea, Richard Dawkins said: > “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; Nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.” Even if it’s totally wrong, it is an interesting thought experiment.
  - rladd 7y ago
    Yes, but a thought experiment is not a theory.
ajuc 7y ago
It's funny how modern psychology is so much like ancient philosophy of nature - assuming random things because it feels sensible and arguing about them using analogies and magical thinking.

dboreham 7y ago

The hardware is the same but the software had to be developed.

Koshkin 7y ago
Just wait for the AI software to start designing hardware. (This is what might have actually happened in the case of the non-A I, when, say, the language triggered a step in the brain's physical evolution.)

lovecg 7y ago

Useful original thought is extremely rare. There had to be a very long accumulation of knowledge passed down through generations before a critical mass built up.

minikites 7y ago

Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than contemporary hunter gatherers. My hunch is that we spend a lot of time at local maximums until an outside force motivates us to go through a period of being worse off before becoming better off (after the negatives have been addressed and the positives refined).

BurningFrog 7y ago
> Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than contemporary hunter gatherers. I keep hearing this, and it's probably true in some sense. But agriculture is also an incredibly good deal, in that it now supports 7000 million human lives. H&G only reached about 50 million. So it becomes a philosophical question: Is it better to have a few happy people alive or a huge population of less happy ones? I'm reminded of the old "explorer's fallacy", where you encounter a tribe in the jungle and marvel at how healthy everyone is. Not realizing that the sick and infirm aren't allowed to live there.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  I don't know if it's a question of happiness, but instead it was probably one of necessity. H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly dispersed in nature. Agriculture gave man the ability to manifest abundance without necessarily depending on nature to provide. I think there are many studies on the overall health of hunter-gatherers as a result of diet and exercise and leisure time as demanded by the lifestyle. In early agricultural societies you have to work harder and longer and you're forced to eat a lot of bread, potatoes and corn and other low quality foods.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Of course, you can only study the diets of the living. > H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly dispersed in nature. But... doesn't "numbers were kept in check" mean "surplus people starved to death"?

fpo 7y ago

Why should it have? Progress is always incremental. Even before civilization there were minute steps towards organization from just pure hunter-gatherer days. Just because the neolithic period started 12-15k years ago doesn't mean somebody woke up one day with a modern brain smart enough to plant things.

abtinf 7y ago
It took an Einstein of the time to figure out things could even be planted. It is a monumental achievement.
- n4r9 7y ago
  Writing is also a far greater (/ less likely) achievement than many people realise. You need a language, enough social structure to create a demand for written instructions/messages beyond simple pictures, and an Einstein-level linguistic genius to figure out how to break down and codify language utterances in a way that can readily be learnt and understood by the general population. Some languages such as Guniyandi have only recently undergone this conversion [0], in fact there are likely thousands of languages still without writetn forms [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooniyandi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooniyandi [1] https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
  - iguy 7y ago
    But writing didn't (IIRC) start with writing down speech. It started with accountancy, with recoding taxes payed and owed. So it arises with agricultural states, it's part of what lets a king rule so many peasants that merely having his brothers remember who owes how much doesn't work anymore. Figuring out that it could be used to write sentences took a few millennia after that. And only after that came enough simplification for people other than palace/temple employees to learn it.
    - n4r9 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

> If humans has the same capacity for thought 100,000 years go as they have now, why didn't "modern civilization" develop earlier? Why do you assume that it didn't? There's plenty of emerging evidence that even foraging humans had a fairly complex social organization, with "proto-cities" that functioned as ceremonial centers at the very least. That's circumstantial evidence that they did have "civilization" of a sort, and perhaps even "modernity".

distances 7y ago
/r/AskHistorians has a several topics on this theme (if it's possible there are older civilizations we don't know about). The consensus is that it's very unlikely. E.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5yrmi/how_certain_are_we_that_the_first_civilizations/ejhb9p1/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5yrmi/how_c...

sgarrity 7y ago

While I'm not sure it goes back nearly as far as 100,000 years (it's been a while since I read it), the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel) does a compelling job of exploring why complex civilizations arose in some times and places and not in others. An aspect I found particularly interesting was the idea that basic physical geography could have played a strong role in determining when and where complex civilizations arose.

henriquemaia 7y ago
You might want to check this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2OQmvRUdr3U https://youtube.com/watch?v=2OQmvRUdr3U (title: African History Disproves “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond). tl;dw: that theory is not as valid as it may seem at first.
WalterBright 7y ago
An alternative view is "Triumph of the West" by Roberts. https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/0316749893 https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/031674989...

abtinf 7y ago

Man had to learn how to think, then acquire knowledge. This question is part of what inspired Harry Binswanger’s book, “How We Know”: “Mankind has existed for 400,000 years. But 395,000 of those years were consumed by the Stone Age. The factor that freed men from endless toil and early death, the root cause of the elevated level of existence we now take for granted, is one precious value: knowledge. The painfully acquired knowledge of how to master nature, how to organize social existence, and how to understand himself is what enabled man to rise from the cave to the skyscraper, from warring clans to a global economy, from an average lifespan of less than 30 years to one approaching 80.” http://www.how-we-know.com/ http://www.how-we-know.com/

chrisco255 7y ago
Hunter-gatherers who made it to age 25 were just as likely to live to their 60s as modern folks are today. The 30 year old average life expectancy of Neolithic man comes from two things: one, we cannot properly age skeletal fossils to a degree of certainty after wisdom teeth have fully grown in. You can't tell from a 10k year old fossil if it was a 30 year old or a 55 year old at time of death. Finally, infant mortality was extremely high and remained very high until modern medicine. These infant deaths decreased the average life expectancy but it masks the lifespan that healthy adults would typically experience.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Infections were a major cause of death, including in infants. Also starvation, violence and the elements. You can argue that those who survived infections, the elements, violence and starvation were in much better shape to survive everything else. Also contrary to popular belief, cardiovascular disease happened before modern times, and even if we might be talking of Neolithic only, this happened even in hunter gatherer populations. Found these pretty interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361360598X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2757994 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... In modern times what we have is much less violence, vaccines, antibiotics, a healthcare system capable of healing injuries or restore you after heart attacks, etc and in spite of prevailing beliefs we’ve got proper nutrition and at least in the industrialized countries we aren’t dying of starvation or nutritional deficiencies anymore. Our problem is “energy poisoning”. Once we figure out how to not eat so damn much, we’ll eliminate most chronic disease we have today.

robotomir 7y ago

The climate has been fairly stable over the last 10,000 years?

The_rationalist 7y ago
Source?
- chrisco255 7y ago
  It's called the Holocene period in geology, see below: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL084384 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

HBKXNCUO 7y ago

A bigger question would be: why did whatever selective process that resulted in our capacity for thought stop improving on it 100,000 years ago?

pacaro 7y ago
I'm assuming that as populations become larger (more successful?) that the selection process becomes more diffuse. It's clear that sub-populations have evolved or acquired useful traits (particularly dietary adaptations) in relatively short timescales. From TFA it appears that the original human population in Africa was pushed out of the interior by climate changes, it's not inconceivable that those conditions also provided evolutionary pressure
WalterBright 7y ago
> why did whatever selective process that resulted in our capacity for thought stop improving on it 100,000 years ago? Some people have posited that it's because some fundamental biological limits were run into. (Our biology has already made many compromises to support the large brain, such as extended childhood, compromises in women's skeletal structure, the large energy consumption of the brain, etc.)

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Why are we not developing technology right now that will be developed in the next 1000 years? Progress is incremental. One step after the other.

awayfromhomenow 7y ago
Until it's not. Until a pandemic wipes out an appreciable portion of your population, and causes a reversion, until a war does the same, or an asteroid, or low birth-rate. Progress isn't some irreversible, implacably forward-moving wave.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago

Lots of tribal folks with modern minds did not develop like this. Aboriginals in Australia come to mind.

chrisco255 7y ago

My guess would be climate. 100K ago, humans were in the midst of the ice age and it lasted until about 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Holocene period. The early Holocene was actually warmer than modern temperatures, and it is said that even the Sahara was fertile in this time. As the ice age ended, rain patterns shifted and vegetation flourished. It probably then became possible to remain in one area for an extended period of time without roaming around in search of game and wild food, and you could actually support a larger tribe of people. Once that began to happen, people started learning and developing local culture, language, skill development, etc. and sharing that knowledge. For the same reason we see hubs of specialized labor in modern society (like Silicon Valley, Hollywood, New York financial district, etc), the first communities to develop agriculture were able to exploit those skills to improve techniques over time, and caused places like Mesopotamia and Egypt to develop and thrive over time. It appears as though Mesopotamia developed clay tablets with written language as an early form of contractual agreement rather than as a form of communication or literature.

cocomittens 7y ago

Because nowadays when a system is created (born) a basic package of the sum total of current knowledge is downloaded onto the system (school) with a vast array of optional packages one can choose from (books, college, etc). To add to the sum total of knowledge is a painstakingly long process in comparison (phd, r&d, innovation). But someone had to be the person to git init and make the first commit. Even if they had the same specs, they didn't have access to a 10k+ year old code base. If a modern person had grown up in ancient civilization, I guarantee they wouldn't be all that much more knowledgable than others of that time.

WalterBright 7y ago
> If a modern person had grown up in ancient civilization, I guarantee they wouldn't be all that much more knowledgable than others of that time. If I was dropped into Roman times, what I'd invent is a printing press. After inventing paper made from rags.

maxlamb 7y ago

The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond pretty much answers this question, pretty convincingly to me at least. The book "Sapiens" does provide additional insight as well on this subject.

gshdg 7y ago

Population density.

WalterBright 7y ago

Human progress has followed an exponential curve. There's no evidence that intelligence has increased along with it. In order for the mind to conceive of something, first there must be the idea that it is possible. For example, in the 1970's lots of people wondered what a home computer would possibly be good for. The only things people could imagine were storing recipes and balancing one's checkbook. I'm not kidding.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

carapace 7y ago

I suspect civilization as we know it is a post-traumatic response to the Younger Dryas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

TheCoelacanth 7y ago

Why presume that they wanted to develop civilization? Early civilization was superior to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in only one aspect: how large of a population it could support. In nearly every other way, it provided a worse lifestyle.