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> The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. How so? Our biology is virtually identical. Our emotional

> The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. How so? Our biology is virtually identical. Our emotional, physical and spiritual needs haven't changed, have they? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "our culture", but if we assume some kind of Californian derivative, the most obvious difference is our built environment, which features more shopping malls, office towers, airports, highways and hospitals than Ga-Mohana. And more obesity. More guns too, but they had weapons and laws for the same reasons we do, didn't they? What do you imagine are the differences between our culture, language and customs vis a vis people of 100k years ago?

whimsicalism 6y ago
The unstated (and pretty obviously wrong) premise in your comment is that culture is somehow deterministically derived from biology.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  "Determines" is too strong a word, since all human cultures are different - more different than our biology would suggest, but probably no more different than our respective micro-climates and natural resource distributions. What would you say culture is, and what determines it?
burnished 6y ago
Are you serious?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  I'm curious! Did your mother, grandmother, or spouse collect crystals? Many humans - perhaps most - keep at least one crystal attached to a finger. Why is that?
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    In terms of wedding rings, that's not a fundamental human value, but simply because De Beers launched a campaign that still today is a school case for advertising, due to it's ROI. "In 1938, the diamond cartel De Beers began a marketing campaign that would have a major impact on engagement rings. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the price of diamonds collapsed.[25] At the same time, market research indicated that engagement rings were going out of style with the younger generation. Before World War II, only 10% of American engagement rings contained a diamond." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      That refers to diamonds - were there no stones on rings before diamonds, or were there other types?
    - antonvs 6y ago
      Regardless of what led to the practice, wearing crystals (or anything) on your finger is still a symbolic expression of the values and beliefs of one's community.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    Do marbles count as crystals? A future archeologist can get confused with them.
okareaman 6y ago
The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different How so? Apart from the obvious personality stereotypes you're drawing upon - chill vs aggressive, which exist in every culture, Germans and Californian cultures aren't that different. They have stop signs, alcohol laws, churches, jewellery stores, maps, family gatherings, weddings, funerals, christenings, horoscopes, sporting allegiances, dress codes, toilet and expectoration norms, sexual mores and food preparation standards. So too did the ancients. I'm wondering how different you imagine these were? I mean, their technologies, foods, footballs and built environment were different, as they are with Germans and Californians, but to what end, culturally?
  - nwienert 6y ago
    Depends on how much you weigh Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, but certainly since reading his work I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. Another datapoint are the many remote and isolated tribes with wildly different cultures, for example not having the concept of object permanence.
    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      > I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. How so? Care to elaborate a little?
      - nwienert 6y ago
        Read the book! Edit: super short summary, it’s possible before ~800 BC many people experienced hallucinations due to not having a theory of mind, oftentimes in the form of gods speaking to them quite literally. Which if you consider how embedded our theory of mind is now vs how prevalent and seriously belief in gods were previously, combined with how common hallucinations in children (Tulpas) and many mental “disorders” are, seems plausible. At some tipping point, trade, large scale civilization and theory of mind coalesced to suddenly remove this as a common mode of thought. I mean try to imagine living in a small tribe with no written language, no idea that you have a brain, a strong belief in the reality of god(s), no concept of science or logic, and many nights spent in the dark sharing ghost stories, and yea, it seems not that far fetched that you’d have a vastly different experience of reality including experiencing many things as not even being from “yourself” as opposed to manifestations of your own brain talking to itself in the form of your beliefs (gods).
edgyquant 6y ago
Our biology is “virtually” identical but our brains are not. There is a reason why we distinguish between modern humans (who appear some time between 100,000 and 30,000ya) and archaic humans.
- alcover 6y ago
  Naive question: How can we compare those brains beyond clues from cranial capacity and maybe supposed diet ?
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    Absolute differences in the variation between then and now are established by the "molecular clock" concept. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-molecular-clock-and-estimating-species-divergence-41971/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-molecular-cloc...
lordnacho 6y ago
I'd imagine life was more violent back then, that's I've read anyway. To the point where a great number of people were murdered. So my guess is people back then would be less relaxed about eg meeting strangers, and they would maybe all practice self defense. Another thing that might be different is their attitudes to property. That is after all something that has gotten fairly complex since the dawn of civilization. It's also the case that they probably has access to fewer people, so that has an effect on how well they could satisfy their emotional needs.
simonh 6y ago
The emergence of behavioural modernity some 40k to 50k years ago seems to have been a cultural watershed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity It’s possible this might have been a result of the developments of prefrontal synthesis some 70k years ago. https://essentials.news/ai/research/article/acquisition-prefrontal-synthesis-around-70000-years-ago-a0d64c6989 https://essentials.news/ai/research/article/acquisition-pref...
alanbernstein 6y ago
What reason is there to think that people of 100k years ago would have any spiritual needs? What other animals have that need?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  By that reasoning, one would conclude that people today don't have any spiritual needs. And yet the humans of today seem to disagree with that view in large numbers. The humans of 100 years ago disagreed in far greater numbers. So... are they all mistaken about what they need? Or is there some line somewhere between humans of 100k years ago and those of today? Or is it after all reasonable that humans of 100k years ago might have had spiritual needs?
  - alanbernstein 6y ago
    That's an odd conclusion to draw. My point is there is clearly a line at some point in history, and nobody knows when it is. But it seems that spirituality would require at least spoken language, can we not agree on that? I don't know what the consensus is on when spoken language arose. I'm assuming it was not close to 100k years ago.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  It's difficult to know whether other animals have spiritual needs or practices, because we know so little about their languages and communications. Similarly, it is difficult for us to decipher other human culture's spiritual beliefs and practices without knowledge of language. Even non-spiritual behaviour is difficult to decode without language. Language transmits 80% of the intellectual content of television. Try watching the news or a drama series with the sound turned off.

whimsicalism 6y ago

The unstated (and pretty obviously wrong) premise in your comment is that culture is somehow deterministically derived from biology.

wombatmobile 6y ago
"Determines" is too strong a word, since all human cultures are different - more different than our biology would suggest, but probably no more different than our respective micro-climates and natural resource distributions. What would you say culture is, and what determines it?

burnished 6y ago

Are you serious?

wombatmobile 6y ago
I'm curious! Did your mother, grandmother, or spouse collect crystals? Many humans - perhaps most - keep at least one crystal attached to a finger. Why is that?
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  In terms of wedding rings, that's not a fundamental human value, but simply because De Beers launched a campaign that still today is a school case for advertising, due to it's ROI. "In 1938, the diamond cartel De Beers began a marketing campaign that would have a major impact on engagement rings. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the price of diamonds collapsed.[25] At the same time, market research indicated that engagement rings were going out of style with the younger generation. Before World War II, only 10% of American engagement rings contained a diamond." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    That refers to diamonds - were there no stones on rings before diamonds, or were there other types?
  - antonvs 6y ago
    Regardless of what led to the practice, wearing crystals (or anything) on your finger is still a symbolic expression of the values and beliefs of one's community.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  Do marbles count as crystals? A future archeologist can get confused with them.

okareaman 6y ago

The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different

wombatmobile 6y ago
> The culture, language and customs of contemporary California surfers and German football hooligans seems very different How so? Apart from the obvious personality stereotypes you're drawing upon - chill vs aggressive, which exist in every culture, Germans and Californian cultures aren't that different. They have stop signs, alcohol laws, churches, jewellery stores, maps, family gatherings, weddings, funerals, christenings, horoscopes, sporting allegiances, dress codes, toilet and expectoration norms, sexual mores and food preparation standards. So too did the ancients. I'm wondering how different you imagine these were? I mean, their technologies, foods, footballs and built environment were different, as they are with Germans and Californians, but to what end, culturally?
- nwienert 6y ago
  Depends on how much you weigh Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, but certainly since reading his work I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. Another datapoint are the many remote and isolated tribes with wildly different cultures, for example not having the concept of object permanence.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    > I’ve at least upped the prior that the answer is “incredibly different”. How so? Care to elaborate a little?
    - nwienert 6y ago
      Read the book! Edit: super short summary, it’s possible before ~800 BC many people experienced hallucinations due to not having a theory of mind, oftentimes in the form of gods speaking to them quite literally. Which if you consider how embedded our theory of mind is now vs how prevalent and seriously belief in gods were previously, combined with how common hallucinations in children (Tulpas) and many mental “disorders” are, seems plausible. At some tipping point, trade, large scale civilization and theory of mind coalesced to suddenly remove this as a common mode of thought. I mean try to imagine living in a small tribe with no written language, no idea that you have a brain, a strong belief in the reality of god(s), no concept of science or logic, and many nights spent in the dark sharing ghost stories, and yea, it seems not that far fetched that you’d have a vastly different experience of reality including experiencing many things as not even being from “yourself” as opposed to manifestations of your own brain talking to itself in the form of your beliefs (gods).

edgyquant 6y ago

Our biology is “virtually” identical but our brains are not. There is a reason why we distinguish between modern humans (who appear some time between 100,000 and 30,000ya) and archaic humans.

alcover 6y ago
Naive question: How can we compare those brains beyond clues from cranial capacity and maybe supposed diet ?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Absolute differences in the variation between then and now are established by the "molecular clock" concept. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-molecular-clock-and-estimating-species-divergence-41971/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-molecular-cloc...

lordnacho 6y ago

I'd imagine life was more violent back then, that's I've read anyway. To the point where a great number of people were murdered. So my guess is people back then would be less relaxed about eg meeting strangers, and they would maybe all practice self defense. Another thing that might be different is their attitudes to property. That is after all something that has gotten fairly complex since the dawn of civilization. It's also the case that they probably has access to fewer people, so that has an effect on how well they could satisfy their emotional needs.

simonh 6y ago

The emergence of behavioural modernity some 40k to 50k years ago seems to have been a cultural watershed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity It’s possible this might have been a result of the developments of prefrontal synthesis some 70k years ago. https://essentials.news/ai/research/article/acquisition-prefrontal-synthesis-around-70000-years-ago-a0d64c6989 https://essentials.news/ai/research/article/acquisition-pref...

alanbernstein 6y ago

What reason is there to think that people of 100k years ago would have any spiritual needs? What other animals have that need?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
By that reasoning, one would conclude that people today don't have any spiritual needs. And yet the humans of today seem to disagree with that view in large numbers. The humans of 100 years ago disagreed in far greater numbers. So... are they all mistaken about what they need? Or is there some line somewhere between humans of 100k years ago and those of today? Or is it after all reasonable that humans of 100k years ago might have had spiritual needs?
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  That's an odd conclusion to draw. My point is there is clearly a line at some point in history, and nobody knows when it is. But it seems that spirituality would require at least spoken language, can we not agree on that? I don't know what the consensus is on when spoken language arose. I'm assuming it was not close to 100k years ago.
wombatmobile 6y ago
It's difficult to know whether other animals have spiritual needs or practices, because we know so little about their languages and communications. Similarly, it is difficult for us to decipher other human culture's spiritual beliefs and practices without knowledge of language. Even non-spiritual behaviour is difficult to decode without language. Language transmits 80% of the intellectual content of television. Try watching the news or a drama series with the sound turned off.