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> 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 su

by 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 ago
For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  It'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 ago
    They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
    - Orbital_Armada 2y ago
      Although 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
- nkrisc 2y ago
  Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.
number6 2y ago
For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution. It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans. We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence. We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
  - senderista 2y ago
    Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
    - roughly 2y ago
      > smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because 1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and 2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions. Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal

by sho_hn 2y ago

methyl 2y ago

For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.

psunavy03 2y ago
It'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 ago
  They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
  - Orbital_Armada 2y ago
    Although 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
nkrisc 2y ago
Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.

number6 2y ago

For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.

mystified5016 2y ago
Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution. It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans. We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence. We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
- senderista 2y ago
  Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
  - roughly 2y ago
    > smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.

AlotOfReading 2y ago

The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because 1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and 2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions. Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal