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What gets me about prehistory is that even before civilization (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in anatomically modern form, and even
by jl6 4y ago
What gets me about prehistory is that even before civilization (the development of permanent settlements), humans existed in anatomically modern form, and even if they never wrote anything down, would surely still have used language. What did they talk about? We know that illiterate people today are perfectly capable of forming complex thoughts and reasoning. When did those thoughts first emerge? Somebody must have been the first to look up and the stars and wonder. They could have done more than just wonder. There could have been geniuses and villains and poets and master storytellers, long before they had any capability to preserve their culture through writing. And this was probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the earliest stone remains that we call civilization.
- dieselgate 4y agoYeah it’s interesting to think about humanity living without any “permanent” settlements and what the conversations were like.. _pass the salt_
- kqr 4y agoA useful heuristic as far as I know is to imagine "what would a modern human do in that environment?" Make foraging plans, tell stories, bicker, gossip, predict weather, teach toolmaking and clothesmaking, discuss fair allocation of resources, arrange parties, celebrate relationships, make gifts, design song performances, learn dance moves, coordinate construction, agree on repairs for criminal damages, learn local and exotic flora, plan long travels to faraway lands, and the list goes on.
- kajaktum 4y ago>what would a modern human do in that environment? and be sure to knock them in the head (and everyone that you want to bring with them) so they won't remember anything. I doubt they are any different than a hairless monkey. One thing that we got going for us is the written/oral knowledge that we have accumulated.
- towaway15463 4y agoThis is probably closer to the truth. We don’t notice the benefits of modern society and institutions because they are the water that we swim in, they have “always” existed since we were born into them. We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law. I believe the reasons why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle were more to do with man’s inhumanity to man than it was a reluctance to leave some imagined eden. A George Carlin quote comes to mind: Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
- kqr 4y ago> We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law. What makes you think this is true? I have plenty of experience of people who play very nicely with each other, even when they are for all practical purposes not bound by law to. > why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle You use the word "escape" as though we are universally better off now than when we spent a few hours a day foraging. Do you have evidence for this? What if people preferred to live their lives the way they did -- much like, I suppose, you prefer to live life the way you do? (No doubt do many people now have it better than many people then, but it sounds like you're asserting that the opposite is not the case too.)
- kqr 4y agoAs far as geniuses go, many of the people we would think of as geniuses today have two things the people we are discussing here had not: - They are able to stand on the shoulders of a far broader range of giants, thanks to writing; and - They have access to far more tools of reasoning (arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!) that those in the past did not have. So while there may well have been intellectual equals to the geniuses of today also back then, they would not have been able to perform the feats of geniuses today. Again, for lack of tooling, not wit.
- eropple 4y ago> arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start! Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is awful.
- laxmin 4y agoHindu numerals if we have to be precise, transmitted to the west by Arabs
- Jedd 4y ago> Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is awful. Hindu numerals, do you mean?
- earth_walker 4y ago
- jhoechtl 4y agoAll creditable goal. What about warefare?
- danschuller 4y agoI guess for now we can't know - but were they truly modern humans? They might have had the same hardware but the cultural/consciousness software may have been far different than what we have today. It's fun to think about, books like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind or the Sapiens both explore some version of this.
- raffraffraff 4y agoFart jokes. I absolutely guarantee you, the were fart jokes.
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- macleginn 4y agoVery close similarities between mythological narratives in very different parts of the world (e.g., South Africa and Australia) show that some of them should have appeared tens of thousands of years ago. The earliest motifs seem to be about the origin of death. https://folklore.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/28?locale=en_US https://folklore.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/28?locale=en_US
- kqr 4y agoHumans are amazing at recording facts through narratives passed down through generations. Geography that has long since disappeared can be preserved through thousands o years: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/
- fouronnes3 4y agoHumans in 13k years will look back and wonder at us too. Somebody must have been the first to upload to the HyperBrainSuperXL10000 and feel one with the solar system.
- __alexs 4y agoWhere I'm from we call that the Total Perspective Vortex.
- pjmlp 4y agoThe way things are going, we will be the next dinosaurs, and that civilization in 13k will be digging artifacts from our time, while telling legends of a civilization that supposedly went to the stars, could travel across the globe in hours, being able to talk with anyone across the globe, cure most desease, designed machines that could see bodies at molecular level. Naturally every adult knows that those stories are just ways for the grandparents to ease kids into their sleep, who would believe in such nonsense, given the current state of the planet in 13k years.
- Luc 4y agoAre you talking about global warming? Because that’s going to make a lot of people miserable but is far from a global civilisation destroying event.
- gigglesupstairs 4y agoI used to think like that. But Covid has really humbled me. Not to mention the possible release of ancient viruses due to melting permafrost. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-diseases-being-released-by-climate-change/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-diseases-b...
- monkeynotes 4y agoCOVID was mindblowing. For the first time in recorded history the entire planet coordinated a response to an existential threat. And we survived. In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work, live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and then coordinated a roll out. We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.
- WHA8m 4y agoI only recently have heard about the 'stoned ape theory'. It basically plays with the idea, that drugs (in this case mushrooms) must have played a crucial role in the development of thinking, thought and consciousness (as we humans know it). https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
- dr_dshiv 4y agoHere are some conversational talking points: “Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe? Again, there are more questions than answers. Crucially, however, we do now have tentative hints as to the actual religion of these people. In Gobekli Tepe several skulls have been recovered. They are deliberately defleshed, and carefully pierced with holes so they could – supposedly – be hung and displayed. Skull cults are not unknown in ancient Anatolia. If there was such a cult in the Tas Tepeler it might explain the graven vultures pictured ‘playing’ with human heads. As to how the skulls were obtained, they might have come from conflict (though there is no evidence of this yet), it is quite possible the skulls were obtained via human sacrifice. At a nearby, slightly younger site, the Skull Building of Cayonu, we know of altars drenched with human blood, probably from gory sacrifice.”
- kqr 4y agoThe prevalence of human sacrifice throughout history baffles me. I know it's just my cultural heritage to see humans as unique individuals with brains full of original ideas, but it still shocks me every time I hear it that someone would willingly, without being threatened, extinguish a human life.
- gammabetadelta 4y agowe aint nothing but mammals incentives drives us overpopulation was controlled by sacrifice and infanticide
- kqr 4y agoI don't buy this whole "overpopulation" thing people keep talking about in more or less appropriate concepts. Through virtually all of history, there's a strong correlation between "more people" and "better living conditions". We are a social species. We're practically made to effectively make use of as many of us as possible to preserve ourselves.
- uwagar 4y agowriting is not all that important. oral transmission is effective when the immediate community is just a huddle.
- EnKopVand 4y agoSapiens by yuval noah harari deal with a lot of the things you’re pondering.
- simonh 4y agoThere’s a fascinating hypothesis about the development of recursive reasoning that’s worth a read. Obviously we don’t have access to the actual language and verbal culture of people back then, but it looks like we might be able to map out some of the cognitive functions they had available to them, and correlate that to the development of material culture, including artistic expression. https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-14656/ https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
- specialist 4y agoNice. Will read. One of the many notions from Lingua ex Machina [2001] is the evolution from protolanguage to proper language. From nonrecursive verb-noun clauses to recursive subject-verb-noun clauses. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Machina-Reconciling-Darwin-Chomsky/dp/0262531984 https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Machina-Reconciling-Darwin-Cho... That book had so many intriguing open ended questions, before we had the tech (ability) to verify stuff. IIRC, others were: the way the neocortex is organized into hexagonal columns, which I think is what Jeff Hawkins (et al) is working on; how notions compete inside our head using Darwinian processes; how thinking (consciousness) may be like resonance across our brains, like a song. Thanks again for the link. Am noob, so just barely grasp this stuff, but am excited nonetheless to learn about more recent findings. We live in an age of miracles. -- Summary copypasta from Amazon: A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language. A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle. But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself. William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.
- philipov 4y agoCivilization is usually defined as more than just the development of permanent settlements. Permanent settlements existed in the fertile crescent during the neolithic for thousands of years before civilizations emerged in that region during the early bronze age. What characterizes civilizations is the emergence of stratified societies in those settlements, with specialized classes of people such as priests and metalworkers, who relied on others to provide them with food.
- Jedd 4y agoWell, yes - anatomically (and to a large degree, intellectually) we're probably indistinguishable from homo sapiens of 300k years ago. In Yuval Noah Harari's book 'Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind' he posits that there was a 'cognitive revolution' about 70k years ago, during which our cognitive & language capabilities moved beyond the purely physical observations, to the more abstract & metaphysical. This allowed for a shedload of cultural changes -- larger societies, the birth of religions / mythologies, money, etc. All those abstract concepts that work when we all agree they exist even if they actually don't. To your question - yes, we necessarily only have written history from civilisations that wrote things down (and those things survived), but it seems like there was an evolutionary change that meant we could finally leverage our one distinctly useful skill, coordinating large groups of people at scale, by getting us all to adopt a shared reality that didn't exist yet. (This kind of explains why we adopted agriculture, despite it clearly being a bad idea at the time.)
- Balgair 4y ago> humans existed in anatomically modern form However, our genetic form may have been very different. It seems that lactase persistence[0] was not wide spread in nearly any human population until the domestication of animals. I know that comes off as a bit pedantic, but sometimes those little genetic variations matter quite a bit. I won't cop to being well read in paleogenetics, but I have a feeling that there's been a lot of evolution between them and us. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
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