7 ms·

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors: a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is act

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors: a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, but those aren't visible to the people making the decision. b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.

ghaff 5y ago
But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Ffuture-perfect%2F2018%2F11%2F8%2F18052076%2Fhuman-history-in-one-chart-industrial-revolution&psig=AOvVaw1e9LiAMXHPZaXl8a3oRriP&ust=1647391401703000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCLDNiK3xxvYCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.co...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deutschew 5y ago
  The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves. Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you? Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship? Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point. These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse. I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking". Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.
  - animal_spirits 5y ago
    Slave labor in the roman empire was not as cheap as one would think. Garrett Ryan goes into this in his latest videos, "Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E
    - deutschew 5y ago
      haha i actually saw that video, very fascinating
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.
    - deutschew 5y ago
      yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      Wasn’t it Philip K Dick, in VALIS, who wrote “the Empire never ended”? Not in the sense that it didn’t end; it did in the 14th c. to the Ottoman Empire, but that the past is laminated onto the present.
- bpiche 5y ago
  The author and futurist Bruce Sterling (should need no introduction) has spoken about steam engine time before if I’m not mistaken but I might have mixed it up with someone else. Basically the steam engine could have been developed further in the past but the right set of social factors did not align with engineering and metallurgical factors
WalterBright 5y ago
Both the Americas and Eur-Asia seem to have independently invented agriculture, and it didn't seem to lead to a technological explosion until looong afterwards. Selective breeding was not required for early agriculture. That came later. I'm sure agriculture started with "hey we like strawberries, strawberries grow from seeds, let's plant the seeds and have more strawberries" for each of the plants they gathered.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > strawberries grow from seeds You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?
    - fingerlocks 5y ago
      Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Anyone who lived on a farm knew better. And selective breeding of plants and animals had gone on for millennia before that.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        5y ago
jcranmer 5y ago
> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else. The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well. In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best. Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?
missedthecue 5y ago
So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?
- dendriti 5y ago
  This question assumes a lot... and that isn't what happened.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment. What made them start civilization?
    - liketochill 5y ago
      Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies. Nobody likes to talk about it, though.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor. Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-gave-us-civilization.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...
treeman79 5y ago
I’m going with beer as a trigger for agricultural revolution. You see occasional stories about a moose getting drunk and stuck in a tree on fermenting apples. Now some ancient hillbilly figures out that they can get drunk on fermenting fruit. So eventually someone gets the bright idea to try and do it themselves.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > someone gets the bright idea All my ideas are Bright ideas (tm).

ghaff 5y ago

But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Ffuture-perfect%2F2018%2F11%2F8%2F18052076%2Fhuman-history-in-one-chart-industrial-revolution&psig=AOvVaw1e9LiAMXHPZaXl8a3oRriP&ust=1647391401703000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCLDNiK3xxvYCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.co...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deutschew 5y ago
The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves. Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you? Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship? Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point. These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse. I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking". Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  Slave labor in the roman empire was not as cheap as one would think. Garrett Ryan goes into this in his latest videos, "Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5HDQUuI6_E
  - deutschew 5y ago
    haha i actually saw that video, very fascinating
- ghaff 5y ago
  The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.
  - deutschew 5y ago
    yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    Wasn’t it Philip K Dick, in VALIS, who wrote “the Empire never ended”? Not in the sense that it didn’t end; it did in the 14th c. to the Ottoman Empire, but that the past is laminated onto the present.
bpiche 5y ago
The author and futurist Bruce Sterling (should need no introduction) has spoken about steam engine time before if I’m not mistaken but I might have mixed it up with someone else. Basically the steam engine could have been developed further in the past but the right set of social factors did not align with engineering and metallurgical factors

WalterBright 5y ago

Both the Americas and Eur-Asia seem to have independently invented agriculture, and it didn't seem to lead to a technological explosion until looong afterwards. Selective breeding was not required for early agriculture. That came later. I'm sure agriculture started with "hey we like strawberries, strawberries grow from seeds, let's plant the seeds and have more strawberries" for each of the plants they gathered.

InitialLastName 5y ago
> strawberries grow from seeds You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?
  - fingerlocks 5y ago
    Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Anyone who lived on a farm knew better. And selective breeding of plants and animals had gone on for millennia before that.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 5y ago

jcranmer 5y ago

> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else. The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well. In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.

zozbot234 5y ago
Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best. Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?

missedthecue 5y ago

So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?

dendriti 5y ago
This question assumes a lot... and that isn't what happened.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment. What made them start civilization?
  - liketochill 5y ago
    Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies. Nobody likes to talk about it, though.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor. Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-gave-us-civilization.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...

treeman79 5y ago

I’m going with beer as a trigger for agricultural revolution. You see occasional stories about a moose getting drunk and stuck in a tree on fermenting apples. Now some ancient hillbilly figures out that they can get drunk on fermenting fruit. So eventually someone gets the bright idea to try and do it themselves.

WalterBright 5y ago
> someone gets the bright idea All my ideas are Bright ideas (tm).