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They've also discovered neolithic villages that were along the shores of lakes in the alps in present day Switzerland that have been dated to as far back as 1,0

They've also discovered neolithic villages that were along the shores of lakes in the alps in present day Switzerland that have been dated to as far back as 1,000 BC. They were already living in post and beam homes on stilts, herding animals, making pottery, and probably living a pretty nice life.

riffraff 5y ago
Did you mean 10000BC? 1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  By 1000 BC the pyramids were already as old as the Hagia Sophia is now.
- eru 5y ago
  Different parts of the world were in eg the neolithic at different times. The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere. (No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)
liketochill 5y ago
I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet. Text based communication too easily devolves in to flame wars, but the time it took to receive, read, contemplate and respond to a letter seems to moderate tempers.
- meowface 5y ago
  I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. However, there was still real-time in-person communication, which can certainly lead to heated arguments no matter what year you live in. It seemed to have no problem generating persecution, pogroms, and genocide back then. Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet." https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  More like instead of Internet flame wars villages simply waged wars against each other over petty bullshit. The world has less war than ever.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    That's not entirely true - pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out (obviously they would have had murder and such human-to-human conflict). This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      Don't know. It's true that an all-out battle is too risky a proposition. But Chimps e.g. are known to patrol the border areas of their territory in order to catch and kill stray members of neighbouring troupes. You can call that a murder, but I'd go with low-intensity warfare.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      > pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      Ummm, we've discovered tribes that were/are still at that level of technology. They definitely engage(d) in warfare.
    - eru 5y ago
      Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
FpUser 5y ago
>"and probably living a pretty nice life" Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".
- carabiner 5y ago
  Also, ritualized gang rape and subsequent death during childbirth.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    > ritualized gang rape ?
    - iso1631 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiqu...
- zwirbl 5y ago
  fighting, parasites, diseases, sure. but working round the clock is more common in industrialized societies than it was befor https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
keewee7 5y ago
>and probably living a pretty nice life. Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently. 17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Yeah people seem to be completely oblivious about the fact that the past was way more violent than the present.
iso1631 5y ago
Skara Brae dates back about 5000 years and there are even older buildings in the area (Knap of Howar)
nothis 5y ago
Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy) Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work). I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough. But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm... So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs. E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain. And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage. Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing). Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it) But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.
ekianjo 5y ago
Pretty nice life with high infant mortality and 30 years life expectancy with back breaking work and the risk of starvation ever present. Lets not romanticize our ancesters.
- rajin444 5y ago
  To be fair the life expectancy and infant mortality affect one another. If you survived through infancy you would end up living a decent amount of time. I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier. Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.

riffraff 5y ago

Did you mean 10000BC? 1000 BC is already Iron Age, we had had entire civilizations with literature, fine metalwork and gigantic monuments all over the place at that point.

InitialLastName 5y ago
By 1000 BC the pyramids were already as old as the Hagia Sophia is now.
eru 5y ago
Different parts of the world were in eg the neolithic at different times. The iron age didn't arrive simultaneously everywhere. (No clue about this specific place in the Alps, though.)

liketochill 5y ago

I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet. Text based communication too easily devolves in to flame wars, but the time it took to receive, read, contemplate and respond to a letter seems to moderate tempers.

meowface 5y ago
I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. However, there was still real-time in-person communication, which can certainly lead to heated arguments no matter what year you live in. It seemed to have no problem generating persecution, pogroms, and genocide back then. Maybe I'm a naive futurist, but I think the best time for a person to be alive is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be born in a developed country. And also maybe even if you weren't, as long as you weren't born somewhere awful like North Korea.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > I believe written letters actually weren't much of a thing back in 1000 BC. That very much depends where you were. We have lots of surviving letters from that time period.
FpUser 5y ago
>"I feel like the golden age of civilization was pre internet." https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc https://youtu.be/nS5_EQgbuLc
Mikeb85 5y ago
More like instead of Internet flame wars villages simply waged wars against each other over petty bullshit. The world has less war than ever.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  That's not entirely true - pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out (obviously they would have had murder and such human-to-human conflict). This actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it - Only with the advent of agriculture did war make any sense, as before it would always be advantageous to just move to a different area rather than risk the few members of your family/tribe in a fight with another family/tribe, especially in the endless forests that populated much of the environment where humans lived.
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    Don't know. It's true that an all-out battle is too risky a proposition. But Chimps e.g. are known to patrol the border areas of their territory in order to catch and kill stray members of neighbouring troupes. You can call that a murder, but I'd go with low-intensity warfare.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer societies don't seem to have had any kind of wars at all for all we've been able to find out Its not because it did not leave any trace that it did not exist
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Ummm, we've discovered tribes that were/are still at that level of technology. They definitely engage(d) in warfare.
  - eru 5y ago
    Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization

FpUser 5y ago

>"and probably living a pretty nice life" Working round the clock, fighting with other tribes, being eaten by parasites, having all kinds of diseases, I could go on and on. Sounds like "pretty nice life".

carabiner 5y ago
Also, ritualized gang rape and subsequent death during childbirth.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > ritualized gang rape ?
  - iso1631 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Antiqu...
zwirbl 5y ago
fighting, parasites, diseases, sure. but working round the clock is more common in industrialized societies than it was befor https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

keewee7 5y ago

>and probably living a pretty nice life. Human remains from other parts of Europe show many people in this Era died violently. 17 percent of skulls in Denmark from this Era had signs of serious violence. Women and children were not given any mercy.

ekianjo 5y ago
Yeah people seem to be completely oblivious about the fact that the past was way more violent than the present.

iso1631 5y ago

Skara Brae dates back about 5000 years and there are even older buildings in the area (Knap of Howar)

nothis 5y ago

Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.

vidarh 5y ago
I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy) Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work). I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough. But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm... So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs. E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain. And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage. Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing). Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it) But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.

ekianjo 5y ago

Pretty nice life with high infant mortality and 30 years life expectancy with back breaking work and the risk of starvation ever present. Lets not romanticize our ancesters.

rajin444 5y ago
To be fair the life expectancy and infant mortality affect one another. If you survived through infancy you would end up living a decent amount of time. I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > I’m sure our lives are more comfortable now but I’m not sure everyone is happier. Happiness is a combination of too many different factors - you can't really optimize for it.