4 ms·

Stone age animal urine could solve a mystery about technological development

41 points by diodorus 4y ago

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
>The Later Stone Age began in the run-up to the peak of the last Ice Age, and many researchers think the period's climate could have contributed to humans' technological and behavioral changes. Some propose that an increasingly volatile climate may have forced our ancestors to get more creative at effectively exploiting resources. The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC. This crash resulted in widespread resource pressures representing a net-loss in total available calories. Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors. In practical terms this meant groups of humans were increasingly pressured to spend more energy or take more risk to earn the same amount of calories. By the year 10,000 BC, for the first time ever, humanity needed to learn how to survive in a persistently resource scarce environment. This pressure induced a Kuhnian paradigm shift in humanity’s behavior from one of nomadic resource sharing to sedentary hoarding.[1] I'm pretty sure this is the right explanation [1]https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
- hoseja 4y ago
  What would lead humans in the previous "resource abundant" environment to not explode in population, Malthus-style?
  - ginko 4y ago
    Could be that there were megafauna predators like the saber-tooth lion keeping the human population low. Could be other large primates competing for resources.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    My assumption is that we basically did have a population explosion that continues today. Humans, not knowing such a thing as scarcity as a long term phenomenon exists (aka just go somewhere else to get more) over consumed the local fauna as we entered new regions of abundance. The confluence of environment changing as we left the last ice age along with consumption pressures seems like a perfect storm to have a population explosion that leads to mass shortages. A good metaphor to me is like a small bacterial colony that explodes when the environment around it provides a really great breeding ground. However instead of dying off we basically hijacked the system to continue our growth.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    Because real populations don't grow like that. Humans are extremely K-selected, ie it is optimal for us to spend a lot of resources on a small number of offspring. In a resource abundant world that means you can give your kids more food, better clothing and shelter, and more parental attention. Having additional children divides the amount of resources remaining for the others: imagine a family raising 2 kids to adulthood and a 20% surplus of resources - sufficient for 2.4 children; a third child would mean each individual would only receive 80% of the resources they need. You need some multitude of children to successfully pass on your genes, but genetic break even is below population breakeven. Thus in pre-industrial societies population tends to remain stable over long periods of time, you'll get a little bit of growth, but plagues and famines would reset this. For example in Britain the population in 1450 AD was only 11% higher than in 1086 AD, which in turn was only 13% higher than in 100 BC. The rapid growth we see in the modern era and which Malthus based his theory on is a result of infant mortality declining. Back when the 50% of children died before adulthood, there needed to be about twice as many pregnancies to produce a sustainable number of mature offspring. It takes a few generations from when the extra kids stop dying young to when people adjust their behavior to no longer produce all those extra kids, and so you get a few decades of extremely rapid population growth with doubling times close to a single generation. Eventually people do adapt and start targeting smaller family sizes, but population growth continues for several more decades as the extra offspring have kids of their own (a process known as population momentum). After 70-150 years the population has completely adjusted to the new circumstances and the population levels off or even begins declining, a process we are currently seeing in several developed nations despite the absurd abundance of resources available to us compared to pre-industrial times.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      > Humans are extremely K-selected, ie it is optimal for us to spend a lot of resources on a small number of offspring human couples had children like clockwork year after year, but at least half of them died in childhood, with many mothers dying in childbirth, and with nursing motherhood as the only contraceptive. I don't think anybody was holding back as much as they were held back. And this continued up to the baby boom in the 20th century. Time to edit your myth.
pizzaknife 4y ago
ipsum lorem 2.0

41 points by diodorus 4y ago

>The Later Stone Age began in the run-up to the peak of the last Ice Age, and many researchers think the period's climate could have contributed to humans' technological and behavioral changes. Some propose that an increasingly volatile climate may have forced our ancestors to get more creative at effectively exploiting resources. The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC. This crash resulted in widespread resource pressures representing a net-loss in total available calories. Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors. In practical terms this meant groups of humans were increasingly pressured to spend more energy or take more risk to earn the same amount of calories. By the year 10,000 BC, for the first time ever, humanity needed to learn how to survive in a persistently resource scarce environment. This pressure induced a Kuhnian paradigm shift in humanity’s behavior from one of nomadic resource sharing to sedentary hoarding.[1] I'm pretty sure this is the right explanation [1]https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

hoseja 4y ago
What would lead humans in the previous "resource abundant" environment to not explode in population, Malthus-style?
- ginko 4y ago
  Could be that there were megafauna predators like the saber-tooth lion keeping the human population low. Could be other large primates competing for resources.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  My assumption is that we basically did have a population explosion that continues today. Humans, not knowing such a thing as scarcity as a long term phenomenon exists (aka just go somewhere else to get more) over consumed the local fauna as we entered new regions of abundance. The confluence of environment changing as we left the last ice age along with consumption pressures seems like a perfect storm to have a population explosion that leads to mass shortages. A good metaphor to me is like a small bacterial colony that explodes when the environment around it provides a really great breeding ground. However instead of dying off we basically hijacked the system to continue our growth.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Because real populations don't grow like that. Humans are extremely K-selected, ie it is optimal for us to spend a lot of resources on a small number of offspring. In a resource abundant world that means you can give your kids more food, better clothing and shelter, and more parental attention. Having additional children divides the amount of resources remaining for the others: imagine a family raising 2 kids to adulthood and a 20% surplus of resources - sufficient for 2.4 children; a third child would mean each individual would only receive 80% of the resources they need. You need some multitude of children to successfully pass on your genes, but genetic break even is below population breakeven. Thus in pre-industrial societies population tends to remain stable over long periods of time, you'll get a little bit of growth, but plagues and famines would reset this. For example in Britain the population in 1450 AD was only 11% higher than in 1086 AD, which in turn was only 13% higher than in 100 BC. The rapid growth we see in the modern era and which Malthus based his theory on is a result of infant mortality declining. Back when the 50% of children died before adulthood, there needed to be about twice as many pregnancies to produce a sustainable number of mature offspring. It takes a few generations from when the extra kids stop dying young to when people adjust their behavior to no longer produce all those extra kids, and so you get a few decades of extremely rapid population growth with doubling times close to a single generation. Eventually people do adapt and start targeting smaller family sizes, but population growth continues for several more decades as the extra offspring have kids of their own (a process known as population momentum). After 70-150 years the population has completely adjusted to the new circumstances and the population levels off or even begins declining, a process we are currently seeing in several developed nations despite the absurd abundance of resources available to us compared to pre-industrial times.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Humans are extremely K-selected, ie it is optimal for us to spend a lot of resources on a small number of offspring human couples had children like clockwork year after year, but at least half of them died in childhood, with many mothers dying in childbirth, and with nursing motherhood as the only contraceptive. I don't think anybody was holding back as much as they were held back. And this continued up to the baby boom in the 20th century. Time to edit your myth.

pizzaknife 4y ago

ipsum lorem 2.0