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I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" s

I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced. We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested. What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.

civilized 4y ago
Yeah, whenever I see pre-modern tools, clothing, shelter, I always think it's amazing and wonder at how much they must know to make it all work.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Like bronze: alloy copper & tin together, when tin only came from a very few places on earth.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    Linen is my usual example of cultural encoding of what we now see as early tech. Making linen from flax is complicated. https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it. Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down. Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/ https://fairytalez.com/flax/ Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mother-holle/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe... There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them: https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-discovery-of-flax-from-myths-of-the-norsemen/ https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...
    - hzay 4y ago
      I read only Grimm's story, and there's no linenmaking in it?
- mcguire 4y ago
  Take, for example, Clovis points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point). There is an amazing amount of skill in those relatively utilitarian tools.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  How did they cut their nails, I always wonder. Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.
  - ioseph 4y ago
    Bite them, tear them or wear them down with manual tasks I imagine. Flint could make a blade sharp enough to carefully carve your nails back if you really wanted
    - joseda-hg 4y ago
      If you're careful you can bite a spot and then use a different nail to break the longer part without much hassle It's a lot less destructive to the teeth and has the bonus of smoothing the nail
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Rough stones are easy enough to find if they needed to file them but if you've ever seen the hands of someone who does a variety of hard manual work every day it's more likely their nails were just worn and broken naturally with the odd bit chewed off.
  - glandium 4y ago
    > How did they cut their nails They didn't. Probably like felids don't cut their claws.
  - Falkon1313 4y ago
    No need to cut them if you occasionally idly rub a rough rock against them, filing them down before they can get long.
api 4y ago
I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege? Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people. Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution. The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    > The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it. Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory. Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  My guess would be that most of them were. Not just by the tribe for the anti-social aspect, but by its leader for the threat to his power.
- Avicebron 4y ago
tspike 4y ago
Great points. I also wonder how long it will take for us to innovate to an equivalent level of sustainability and stability.
coffeeblack 4y ago
And most importantly: who controlled that new invention. Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
- dTal 4y ago
  Or her position. For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".
oliverbennett 4y ago
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
- renjimen 4y ago
  The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Reminds of this awesome talk about technology collapse, has some petty cool historical examples too - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
ramblenode 4y ago
This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer. In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible. Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.
simonh 4y ago
For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools. Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc. By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods. These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.
  - simonh 4y ago
    It’s true the physical evidence for some of this is fairly spotty because natural materials degrade or disperse, but I think the basic outline is sound. It’s also true the middle Palaeolithic in the region of some 300k years ago represented quite a significant advance in stone tool technology, but material culture was still very elementary for a huge span of time after that. The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture. https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-14656/ https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-... The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years. I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.
jacob171714 4y ago
Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.

civilized 4y ago

Yeah, whenever I see pre-modern tools, clothing, shelter, I always think it's amazing and wonder at how much they must know to make it all work.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Like bronze: alloy copper & tin together, when tin only came from a very few places on earth.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Linen is my usual example of cultural encoding of what we now see as early tech. Making linen from flax is complicated. https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it. Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down. Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/ https://fairytalez.com/flax/ Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mother-holle/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe... There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them: https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-discovery-of-flax-from-myths-of-the-norsemen/ https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...
  - hzay 4y ago
    I read only Grimm's story, and there's no linenmaking in it?
mcguire 4y ago
Take, for example, Clovis points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point). There is an amazing amount of skill in those relatively utilitarian tools.
Aeolun 4y ago
How did they cut their nails, I always wonder. Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.
- ioseph 4y ago
  Bite them, tear them or wear them down with manual tasks I imagine. Flint could make a blade sharp enough to carefully carve your nails back if you really wanted
  - joseda-hg 4y ago
    If you're careful you can bite a spot and then use a different nail to break the longer part without much hassle It's a lot less destructive to the teeth and has the bonus of smoothing the nail
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Rough stones are easy enough to find if they needed to file them but if you've ever seen the hands of someone who does a variety of hard manual work every day it's more likely their nails were just worn and broken naturally with the odd bit chewed off.
- glandium 4y ago
  > How did they cut their nails They didn't. Probably like felids don't cut their claws.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  No need to cut them if you occasionally idly rub a rough rock against them, filing them down before they can get long.

api 4y ago

I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege? Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.

marcosdumay 4y ago
I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people. Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution. The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  > The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it. Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory. Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
coffeeblack 4y ago
My guess would be that most of them were. Not just by the tribe for the anti-social aspect, but by its leader for the threat to his power.
Avicebron 4y ago

tspike 4y ago

Great points. I also wonder how long it will take for us to innovate to an equivalent level of sustainability and stability.

coffeeblack 4y ago

And most importantly: who controlled that new invention. Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.

dTal 4y ago
Or her position. For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".

oliverbennett 4y ago

I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.

renjimen 4y ago
The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Reminds of this awesome talk about technology collapse, has some petty cool historical examples too - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

ramblenode 4y ago

This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer. In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible. Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.

simonh 4y ago

For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools. Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc. By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods. These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.

DubiousPusher 4y ago
Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.
- simonh 4y ago
  It’s true the physical evidence for some of this is fairly spotty because natural materials degrade or disperse, but I think the basic outline is sound. It’s also true the middle Palaeolithic in the region of some 300k years ago represented quite a significant advance in stone tool technology, but material culture was still very elementary for a huge span of time after that. The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture. https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-14656/ https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-... The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years. I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.

jacob171714 4y ago

Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.