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Without those arrogant individuals the food surplus that made your existence possible would not have occurred and you would not exist. And if for some reason y

Without those arrogant individuals the food surplus that made your existence possible would not have occurred and you would not exist. And if for some reason you made it into existence, you would be working in a farm without motorized equipment spending all your time trying to generate the calories you would then be eating right away because refrigeration would not exist either. And everyone else would be spending all their time in the exact same way so all the innovations that make you happy would not exist. Also, paper was as important as the translations, and you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all. Paper is a really big deal but you seem to take it for granted.

doodlebugging 2y ago
> you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. This ignores the fact that for most of human history, everything that we collectively knew about our world and our place in it and how things worked so that we could make plans that guaranteed our survival across the changing seasons was passed on from one generation to the next orally. No one needed paper. Indeed, paper was supposedly first developed in China, a long time before any Christian or Islamic scholars were born or chose to write things down. In fact, if you believe wikipedia then by the time any of these scholars began transcribing ancient knowledge on paper it was in use as toilet paper in China because it was so common. [0] Even considering this, their development of and wide adoption of paper didn't help them preserve everything they knew so that later generations could benefit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper Our distant ancestors had an encyclopedic understanding of their natural world because they lived in it all day, every day of their lives. Their capacity for learning and retaining the stories across generations guaranteed our own existence today as a kaleidoscope of cultures scattered across earth's various ecosystems. We all have something to offer each other and getting hung up on who was first to do something is really unproductive and more than anything, tends to divide us along cultural boundaries. We should celebrate the fact that we have collectively made it this far and continue to work to see that every one of us, no matter where they are, has an opportunity to enjoy the technological changes that have occurred and to benefit from the advancements in knowledge on all subjects. We have no way of knowing how many times some useful tool or bit of knowledge was developed only to be lost for generations because the small group that found that knowledge was later wiped out in some calamity that they had no skills to manage. The paper historical record, though brief relative to our own long history, is incomplete. I would suggest that if our recent ancestors had dedicated as much time to listening to their elders relate the oral histories of their groups then many of the paper gaps would be irrelevant since our oral histories would fill those gaps. And, in closing, if we had maintained a strong appreciation for storytelling across generations and a respect for other cultures different from our own we would not need archaeologists and anthropologists to speculate about anything. There would be no more need for every item, image, or structure discovered to be assigned a role in some past worship ritual. Seriously guys, that shit gets old. Treating our ancestors like they were all dumb-ass cretins lucky to survive from one day to the next is doing them a great disservice when the real answer is that they were the masters of their environments, uniquely qualified among living things to spread and conquer all other species in their paths. They were more daring explorers than anyone in our living history and the tales of their exploits, told to all they encountered, allowed others to follow in their paths spreading farther and faster than any present-day archaeologist would like to give them credit. Looks like I got off topic. LOL Anyway, paper is not such a big deal. If our earliest ancestors were as dull-witted as some archaeologists would suggest then those storytellers would inevitably have been met with cries of "Please stop! My brain is full!" from their dullard audiences and we would all never have existed anyway as all our ancestors ended up as lion or cheetah turds.
kragen 2y ago
paper is great, as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837, but other commonly used writing media have included papyrus (dominant in europe before paper), clay tablets (great for cuneiform), wax tablets, bamboo slips, silk cloth, and palm leaves. many older texts have survived only in one of these forms. also, universities in india date back to before the introduction of any of them; the texts to study were put into poetic meter, memorized, and sung to music, permitting preservation for millennia. the first table of sines in the aryabhatiya is in such a form even though it postdates the widespread adoption of writing materials finding ways to preserve calories for long periods of time was necessary for human migration to regions that have winter, an event that happened tens of millennia before refrigeration. techniques have included salting (used for salt pork, salt beef, bread, most cheeses and sausages), acidification (either by adding vinegar or through lactic-acid fermentation as with sauerkraut and pickles), smoking, preservation in sugar (jam, jelly), simple dehydration (jerky, pemmican, raisins, dates, hardtack and other crackers, nuts, wheat berries, flour, other dried grains, dried pulses, sesame, poppy seeds, and perhaps most importantly, olive oil), fungal growth (used by some cheeses and sausages), leaving root vegetables in the ground, and encasement in something defended by one of the above (other sausages, pies and other empanadas)
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Nice. Then where is the European medieval papyrus, clay tablets, etc? Nowhere to be found. Only parchments.
  - kragen 2y ago
    there's a fair bit of european medieval papyrus, actually! but most of it has decayed for the reasons i said

doodlebugging 2y ago

> you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. This ignores the fact that for most of human history, everything that we collectively knew about our world and our place in it and how things worked so that we could make plans that guaranteed our survival across the changing seasons was passed on from one generation to the next orally. No one needed paper. Indeed, paper was supposedly first developed in China, a long time before any Christian or Islamic scholars were born or chose to write things down. In fact, if you believe wikipedia then by the time any of these scholars began transcribing ancient knowledge on paper it was in use as toilet paper in China because it was so common. [0] Even considering this, their development of and wide adoption of paper didn't help them preserve everything they knew so that later generations could benefit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper Our distant ancestors had an encyclopedic understanding of their natural world because they lived in it all day, every day of their lives. Their capacity for learning and retaining the stories across generations guaranteed our own existence today as a kaleidoscope of cultures scattered across earth's various ecosystems. We all have something to offer each other and getting hung up on who was first to do something is really unproductive and more than anything, tends to divide us along cultural boundaries. We should celebrate the fact that we have collectively made it this far and continue to work to see that every one of us, no matter where they are, has an opportunity to enjoy the technological changes that have occurred and to benefit from the advancements in knowledge on all subjects. We have no way of knowing how many times some useful tool or bit of knowledge was developed only to be lost for generations because the small group that found that knowledge was later wiped out in some calamity that they had no skills to manage. The paper historical record, though brief relative to our own long history, is incomplete. I would suggest that if our recent ancestors had dedicated as much time to listening to their elders relate the oral histories of their groups then many of the paper gaps would be irrelevant since our oral histories would fill those gaps. And, in closing, if we had maintained a strong appreciation for storytelling across generations and a respect for other cultures different from our own we would not need archaeologists and anthropologists to speculate about anything. There would be no more need for every item, image, or structure discovered to be assigned a role in some past worship ritual. Seriously guys, that shit gets old. Treating our ancestors like they were all dumb-ass cretins lucky to survive from one day to the next is doing them a great disservice when the real answer is that they were the masters of their environments, uniquely qualified among living things to spread and conquer all other species in their paths. They were more daring explorers than anyone in our living history and the tales of their exploits, told to all they encountered, allowed others to follow in their paths spreading farther and faster than any present-day archaeologist would like to give them credit. Looks like I got off topic. LOL Anyway, paper is not such a big deal. If our earliest ancestors were as dull-witted as some archaeologists would suggest then those storytellers would inevitably have been met with cries of "Please stop! My brain is full!" from their dullard audiences and we would all never have existed anyway as all our ancestors ended up as lion or cheetah turds.

kragen 2y ago

paper is great, as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837, but other commonly used writing media have included papyrus (dominant in europe before paper), clay tablets (great for cuneiform), wax tablets, bamboo slips, silk cloth, and palm leaves. many older texts have survived only in one of these forms. also, universities in india date back to before the introduction of any of them; the texts to study were put into poetic meter, memorized, and sung to music, permitting preservation for millennia. the first table of sines in the aryabhatiya is in such a form even though it postdates the widespread adoption of writing materials finding ways to preserve calories for long periods of time was necessary for human migration to regions that have winter, an event that happened tens of millennia before refrigeration. techniques have included salting (used for salt pork, salt beef, bread, most cheeses and sausages), acidification (either by adding vinegar or through lactic-acid fermentation as with sauerkraut and pickles), smoking, preservation in sugar (jam, jelly), simple dehydration (jerky, pemmican, raisins, dates, hardtack and other crackers, nuts, wheat berries, flour, other dried grains, dried pulses, sesame, poppy seeds, and perhaps most importantly, olive oil), fungal growth (used by some cheeses and sausages), leaving root vegetables in the ground, and encasement in something defended by one of the above (other sausages, pies and other empanadas)

29athrowaway 2y ago
Nice. Then where is the European medieval papyrus, clay tablets, etc? Nowhere to be found. Only parchments.
- kragen 2y ago
  there's a fair bit of european medieval papyrus, actually! but most of it has decayed for the reasons i said