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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago
- cpncrunch 2y agoNews article says humans, but earliest human (homo sapiens) was around 300kya. The actual paper uses the word hominids rather than humans.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoCan we all agree that 'human' should be defined as all members of the genus Homo?
- Pengtuzi 2y agoNo
- alberto_ol 2y agoArchaic human? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans
- Chris2048 2y ago[flagged]
- fifticon 2y ago[flagged]
- eru 2y agoI would be fairly happy with that definition, but I wouldn't rely on it out-of-context. (I would definitely call Neanderthals "human" in almost any context.)
- ljf 2y agoAccording to 23andme I am 2 to 4% neanderthal, and I think of myself as human...
- eru 2y agoWhile funny, I don't think this has much bearing on the topic at hand: we share a lot of DNA with chimps as well (or rather, the last common ancestor between chimps and humans). But that doesn't mean we should call chimps human. So the shared genes alone can't be used as a reason to call Neanderthals human.
- ljf 2y agoTrue, but while all humans have chimp dna, many humans have 0 percent neanderthal dna - are they more human than me?
- eru 2y agoNo human had a chimp ancestor. But humans share a fairly recent common ancestor with chimps. Some human had Neanderthal ancestors, some did not, as you rightly suggest. However, all humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that's much more recent than our last common ancestor with chimps. Ie we only have 'chimp DNA' in the sense that we share a lot of DNA with them, and that we haven't changed too much since our last common ancestor. Exactly the same is true of us and Neanderthals.
- bloak 2y agoA single-word common name usually refers to a genus: "oak" is anything in Quercus, "wagtail" is anything in Motacilla and so on. That's not conclusive because there are plenty of exceptions, and "human" could easily qualify as a special case, but I don't see why "human" shouldn't be any member of Homo.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThe word human is commonly used for both modern humans and members of the entire genus Homo. Hominids is a more general superset that isn't strictly correct here. The term hominin is more appropriate in this context and what they actually use in the abstract. In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".
- MattPalmer1086 2y agoIs it? This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.
- jb1991 2y agoI think it’s not uncommon to refer to Neanderthals as early humans, I’m sure I’ve read that in many places. Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...
- jojobas 2y agoThe would strongly point to speech developing around that time, but there's no mention of language or speech in the article - odd.
- throwanem 2y agoWhat durable artifacts of either are presented in the article? It's paywalled, I haven't read the whole thing.
- ahazred8ta 2y agoThe common ancestor of neanderthals and homo sapiens had a larger than normal hole in the skull (the hypoglossal canal) which contains the nerve bundle going to the tongue. They're pretty sure that was the result of language use before 1M BC. There may have been several stages of later improvement after the initial development.
- jojobas 2y agoYet some other evidence places it much later at around 130ky. Go figure.
- fritzo 2y agoIt's unclear tech transfer is speech driven. People can read machines and reason about purpose without natural language. We've all learned tricks from undocumented code. I've learned mechanical tricks poking around scrap yards.
- ysofunny 2y agomaybe unclear to you. may I recommend Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. which talks about how text and writing transformed human culture the point (which I learned from the book) is how writting transformed human culture but did not define it, humans have a pre-literal (i.e. written) culture whose origin is literally really lost to history I'm saying that tech transfer can absolutely be speech driven, but I admit that text driven technological transfer is in some ways an improved version of oral-only cultural transmision (i.e. knowledge preservation)
- monero-xmr 2y agoI personally believe forms of writing and record keeping are far, far older than we think, having been discovered and forgotten repeatedly. Very hard for something hundreds of thousands of years old to be preserved. Once you can pass on information orally and written through the generations, knowledge will always improve.
- orwin 2y agoRecord keeping doesn't need writing. Like Incas with their knotted ropes (probably not how how you call it in English). Also, while some central Asians could read and write (they had courrier relay to deliver letters), their administrative/taxing/military system, the decimal system, worked without any writing for two thousand years, only by making a mark on a wooden branch for each person in an Arban, a mark on another for each Arban, again for each Ja'un, again for each minggan. That's how they counted and this was taught without text for at least 1500 years (Mongols wrote something about it in the 13th century, but this system is at least from 300BCE and the Xiongnus)
- yborg 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
- dredmorbius 2y agoWhat's amusing of course is that the word text shares a root with textiles and hence the notion of weaving thread or cloth. I'd strongly suggest not getting bogged down in the details of what various forms of notional recording are --- ink on paper, etching on stone, holes punched in paper, magnetic field alignments in rust (spinning, sequential, or otherwise), bitfields in memory arrays, holographic images ... Records are created by varying matter in space to transmit messages over time. Signals are created by varying energy in time to transmit messages over space. Or expanded slightly: Signals transmit encoded symbolic messages from a transmitter across space through a channel by variations in energy over time to a receiver potentially creating a new record. Records transmit encoded symbolic messages from a writer through a substrate across time by variations in matter over space to a reader potentially creating a new signal.
- gcanyon 2y agoYou have to think that there were breakthroughs in communication technology — not just language in general but possibly also one individual who happened to be good at explaining things, either before or after language, who both taught more people, but also taught them how to teach — that led to step changes in technology.
- dboreham 2y agoTheory: there are no humans without language. Consider: what language do you think in?
- davidmnoll 2y agoAs i replied to the parent comment: this was at least 200k years before speech if you go by the hyoid bone evidence
- mkl 2y agoQuite a lot of humans don't think in language, or do only some of the time, see e.g. https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue..., https://www.livescience.com/does-everyone-have-inner-monologue.html https://www.livescience.com/does-everyone-have-inner-monolog..., https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-internal-monologue https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-intern....
- palad1n 2y agoIndeed, there are two types of people in that regard, whose mind is blown (usually) that there is another type. One thinks in words, one has no words but a smooth stream of thought going.
- marssaxman 2y agoThat's wild - I am clearly the first sort, because I cannot imagine what "a smooth stream of thought" would even be if it were not expressed in words.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago I knew I was late to the party.
- kazinator 2y agoHumans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge around the Renaissance, with the invention of the printing press. The farther back we go, the more we have to use tongue-in-cheek definitions of "rapidly".
- harrylove 2y agoImagine what they’ll say 600,000 years from now. “Humans began to acquire knowledge around the time of Dacro and the Second Wormhole Leap. The farther back we go…”
- newzisforsukas 2y agoAgents probably won't refer to all members of Homo as humans, I would imagine.
- gavindean90 2y agoBut like China had the printing press and gun powder and plenty of other things that went on to be repurposed in the Renaissance. I feel like the narrative of the modern technological exponential growth curve kicking off with the Renaissance is rather Eurocentric and misses that the left end of that graph is likely so shallow as to be hard to differentiate the “before” and the “after”.
- Roadeo 2y agoSlightly unrelated, but James Burke explains this really well in Connections[1] S01E03. Basically he says one of the reasons China didn't experience the rapid growth Europe went through during the Renaissance was because Chinese society during those times had a strict hierarchy. You weren't allowed to rise through the ranks with your inventions or technologies, no matter how revolutionary they were. "No incentive, no change." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
- johnnylambada 2y agoIt’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
- levocardia 2y agoThat idea is pretty similar to "assembly theory" no? In the sense of how much information or evolution was necessary to generate some artifact, be it a benzene molecule, a stone tool, or an iphone
- visarga 2y agoIt took humans 300k years, all of us, our collective output to reach this point. Yet people insist on comparing a human who is part of society with a LLM alone, who doesn't even have search, and very limited contexts, just closed book mode remembering.
- lifeofguenter 2y agoWho is comparing LLM with Humans? As far as I can tell nobody is. LLM is a great tool that helps our brains same way a hammer helps our hands.
- namaria 2y agoYou seem to be hallucinating a strawman
- jstanley 2y agoWrong thread, perhaps?
- adolph 2y agoThe same came to my mind. I think there may be some elements of assembly which have to do with biological process that don’t apply to “accumulation of technological knowledge,” but I need to reread it. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9 Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.
- tzm 2y agoJust imagine where we'll be 600k from now.
- euroderf 2y agoUnrecognizable as a species.
- hollerith 2y agoLong gone, having been killed by AI research probably.
- Chris2048 2y agoIn the fuel tanks of future Cephalopoda.
- sethammons 2y agoI was surprised to learn that octopus fossils exist that predate dinosaurs. I dropped all hope for their eventual world domination. If they haven't done it by now...
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThe past 100 years of development are unfathomable already - even though some sci-fi from 100 years ago was accurate, so there was some imagination of what things could be like already. I like to believe I can vaguely predict what the next 100 years will bring, but that's based in a cynicism that the big scientific discoveries have been done already. But 1000 or more years, unfathomable. It's the one reason where I wish time travel or suspended animation was real, just so I can see what the future might bring. Assuming it meanders on as it has for the past few thousand years, and there's no Great Filter event.
- EasyMark 2y agoI don’t think our species will make it that long. We will have scienced our way to some sort of singularity or be extinct by several hundred thousand years.
- newzisforsukas 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210826223800/http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160111-what-is-it-that-makes-you-a-human-and-not-something-else https://web.archive.org/web/20210826223800/http://www.bbc.co...
- oopsallmagic 2y agoAnd to think it culminates in tech companies emitting more CO2 than Belgium to make celebrity deepfakes and tell us to put glue on pizza. Wow.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoMore recent history seems to paint another picture - knowledge is quickly gained as cognitive ability increases, and is even more rapidly lost once it diminishes. Think of not only the replication crisis in science, but also the despair to retain "tacit knowledge" the failure of which often results in outright abandonment and outsourcing to somewhere else. The technology to land on the Moon seems to be effectively lost. The supersonic airliner is for some reason not available either. Same happened in Rome, and Rome itself together with Greece rediscovered civilization from a much darker age before them. In light of that, the idea that any real knowledge could be retained for that long is preposterous.
- integricho 2y ago>>> The technology to land on the Moon seems to be effectively lost. The technology might be, but not the knowledge. The tech just became obsolete and probably not up to safety standards anyway. I doubt we'd have much trouble recreating a better equivalent if the incentives existed.
- Anotheroneagain 2y agoWe couldn't. It was just a well known example. Writing doesn't help much - the words lose their meaning without people capable of acquiring the knowledge before hand. Whatever you preserve is worthless without the mountain of implicit knowledge that can only be acquired, and not taught. Knowledge is being lost even as elderly workers try to pass their knowledge to new hires with zero success.
- MediumOwl 2y ago> The supersonic airliner is for some reason not available either. This whole comment shows a solid amount of ignorance of history, but this particular quote is completely preposterous. "for some reason" is money, plain and simple. Just go read the Wikipedia article on Concorde. And there are plenty of supersonic military airplanes, the technology is definitely there. > Same happened in Rome, and Rome itself together with Greece rediscovered civilization from a much darker age before them. Did you ever hear about Ancient Egypt?
- wiz21c 2y agoWhy don't they just look for the monolith ? :-)
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoWhat if they did find it and that's why we don't send crewed missions to the moon anymore? Think about it. The first manmade object on the moon was in 1959. The first pineapple on pizza was in 1962. Coincidence, or lunar monolith? You decide!
- dredmorbius 2y agoAnother ASU researcher, Sander van der Leeuw, whose nearly decade-old presentation at the "More is Different" conference on complexity theory in Singapore looks how stone tool archaeology tracks with intellectual capacity (and most specifically the size of short-term memory (7 +/- 2 items for modern humans, according to most accounts). Video, 1h6m running time: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug> (I'm aware Google / YouTube are making alternative interface usage more challenging. MPV handles this stream well, as should tools such as VLC which incorporate it and/or ytdl.) Video is admittedly long but has high information density.
- TMWNN 2y agoYet more evidence that unknown civilizations rose and fell multiple times before recorded history began ~4000 BC. (The Why Files fans can insert here "The Younger Dryas!")
- pimpampum 2y agoMy guess is language emergence allows to teach and "accumulate" knowledge in cultures.
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoLanguage transmission for sure. The Tower of Babel slowed technology considerably and by design.
- EasyMark 2y agoThe Tower of Babel?
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoGenesis 11 in the Bible. Men decide to build a tower to Heaven. God isn't having that so he scrambles every language so the workers can't communicate with each other. They put down their tools and migrate to other locations around the globe.
- greekanalyst 2y ago"The result is, our cultures — from technological problems and solutions to how we organize our institutions — are too complex for individuals to invent on their own.” Yes, solo geniuses might often make unbelievable inventions on their own. But science, progress and innovation are all social concepts at the end of the day. I find this pretty amazing.
- fergonco 2y agoYou will find "the secret of our success" an interesting read. One thing I remember is: There are some cultures out there hunting seals with some tools that are made using parts... of seals. Some European explorers almost perished where locals were just living their routine (supported by their cultural baggage).
- JohnMakin 2y agoAncient human anthropology is a fascinating subject because we are still discovering so much yet know so little. Stone tools remained essentially unchanged for a long, long time. 600kya would have been within the range where there were still multiple homo species occupying very similar regions. An important thing to remember is that the homo family tree is more like a bush than a tree, with lines getting very blurry and a lot of interbreeding. It makes me wonder how much technology like this actually came from our precise lineage or was shared/stolen/learned amongst human species.
- HocusLocus 2y agoThis is a tale of one million years ago. Life evolves slowly and our equipment was essentially the same as today. They must have been the original thinkers and the original lovers, with motivations and daydreams we would easily recognize. We are Nature's first experiment of an advanced thinking species writing its own rules, so why has our recent recorded history been a tale of human upheaval, driven by the actions of empires and regional powers? I propose that for the longest march of human prehistory, small villages along a trade route that shared genes and language, goods and services, was a very stable unit of human society. And I mean civilized on every scale and over time, where the simple desire of young to start a family and live eventful fulfilling lives in peace is the norm and they had done so. This tale is in the subtle and expressive language of today and happens in fast-time with a single individual, but consider that the events and astronomical observations could have unfolded on any timescale. Over a lifetime, or even several. The end result being that even ancient people could glimpse their place in the universe, and essential truth about their world. We had socialized and innovated but had no need for stone monuments to cheat time, and they would not have anyway. If there are, they are buried in the deep sediments of East Africa. You and I are their only legacy. ~Stargazer: A Novel of One Million Years Ago
- papaver-somnamb 2y agoNot directly on topic, but: Didn't use to be so interested in (or, allow my attention to be diverted to?) early human history and anthropology, until on recommendation I watched a movie "Man from Earth" [0]. Talk about baking your noodle: The story of someone claiming to be over 10K years of age, intimated to a group of academic peers that draw on their respective domain knowledge to assess the claim. Draws a fascinating, engrossing, not implausible yarn. Ya gotta wonder .. What would it have been like? Exactly how did we climb out of the muck? [0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=man+from+earth https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=man+from+earth Viewable at no charge on Youtube!