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Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: htt
by nkrisc 2y ago
Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.
I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agothis is insane. 6 year olds 800 years ago went to school ?
- drysine 2y agoIt's not clear how old he was.
- seertaak 2y agoOne of the drawings had the inscription 'I am a wild beast' -- that's 5-7 year old territory. Ofc it's possible that I'm missing some cultural nuance, but the picture is consistent with precocious-little-kid-with-visceral-imagination. He must have been a joy to parent!
- nkrisc 2y agoWell, probably not most children. I don’t really know anything about that particular region at that particular time, but based on history generally, literacy was - until recently - often reserved for higher social classes.
- skzv 2y agoFrom the wiki article: > Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.
- datameta 2y agoNovgorod was the only major East Slavic settlement to avoid destruction or subjugation by the Golden Horde, so I think it is akin to a boy from a well-to-do family in medieval Avignon or Strasbourg learning to read and write. Meaning, not just any city or any family in the mid/late 13th century had the need or means for such schooling, but as pointed out in this thread it was more likely in Novgorod.
- sho_hn 2y ago> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
- methyl 2y agoFor pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
- psunavy03 2y agoIt's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
- jncfhnb 2y agoThey weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
- Orbital_Armada 2y agoAlthough the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes
- benbreen 2y agoAuthor of the original Appendix article here (the one about Darwin's kids) - I think it got on HN today because I linked to while discussing Onfim here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-child-artists https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...
- dang 2y agoHi Ben! I'll email you a repost invite for the Onfim article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174) - if you wait a week or so and then use it, the repost will go in the second-chance pool. The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a short time period.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago2014! Amazing.
- srean 2y agoThat's one of the most endearing article I have read in a long time. Thanks for the joy.
- dillydogg 2y agoIt's amazing to think about. I'm sure you could take one of more ancient human babies, teleport them to the present day, and they would be able to grow up like any other kid. It's remarkable. Part of our human-ness is our robust written and oral histories.
- stavros 2y agoYou could probably go tens of thousands of years back and have this still be the case.
- gyan 2y agoExcept for their immune systems or lactose tolerance.
- gambiting 2y ago65% of humans have lactose intolerance, so depending on where exactly you teleport them to it might be a completely normal thing. I'd imagine the immune system will have the capacity to develop in the same way too, so really it should work out fine.
- dillydogg 2y agoAs an immunologist, I see no reason why the newborn from tens of thousands of years ago wouldn't be perfectly suited for the modern world.
- nkrisc 2y agoLactose tolerance in Europeans likely arose with early PIE groups as they began domesticating horses and oxen. Perhaps several time independently in different groups. Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well. Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.
- hobo_in_library 2y agoOn the flip side, in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them (unlike many of us today). Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those who came before us
- sdeframond 2y ago> you’d find they’re just like us. Yep, and it's good to remember that "us" is still a pretty diverse bunch.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoMy favorite part of wikipedia's article on Onfim is this absurdly understated sentence: > One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight. I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.
- GreenWatermelon 2y agoThe article suggests it's his teacher, and I'm inclined to believe this. Pretty consistent with the idea of a kid who doesn't want to do homework, and scorns the source of all homework (the teacher)
- archagon 2y agoIt's curious to consider that Onfim probably grew up, toiled, had a family, and died with an entire life behind him... yet we still think of him as "a boy who lived in Novgorod" because the only evidence of his existence is this set of random childhood scribbles.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoI think it is pretty controversial and surprising. As Wikipedia puts it: "Debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were behaviorally modern as well." Anatomically modern humans emerged 300,000 years ago but behaviourally modern humans only date back to 60,000-150,000 years ago.
- slashdev 2y ago> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way. In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge, cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very different to us. We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over time. Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb - but that would have been historically a very normal and acceptable thing to do.