Make foraging plans, tell stories, bicker, gossip, predict weather, teach toolmaking and clothesmaking, discuss fair allocation of resources, arrange parties, celebrate relationships, make gifts, design song performances, learn dance moves, coordinate construction, agree on repairs for criminal damages, learn local and exotic flora, plan long travels to faraway lands, and the list goes on.
- They are able to stand on the shoulders of a far broader range of giants, thanks to writing; and
- They have access to far more tools of reasoning (arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!) that those in the past did not have.
So while there may well have been intellectual equals to the geniuses of today also back then, they would not have been able to perform the feats of geniuses today. Again, for lack of tooling, not wit.
Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is awful.
Hindu numerals, do you mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu%E2%80%93A...
and be sure to knock them in the head (and everyone that you want to bring with them) so they won't remember anything. I doubt they are any different than a hairless monkey. One thing that we got going for us is the written/oral knowledge that we have accumulated.
A George Carlin quote comes to mind:
Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
What makes you think this is true? I have plenty of experience of people who play very nicely with each other, even when they are for all practical purposes not bound by law to.
> why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle
You use the word "escape" as though we are universally better off now than when we spent a few hours a day foraging. Do you have evidence for this? What if people preferred to live their lives the way they did -- much like, I suppose, you prefer to live life the way you do?
(No doubt do many people now have it better than many people then, but it sounds like you're asserting that the opposite is not the case too.)
Naturally every adult knows that those stories are just ways for the grandparents to ease kids into their sleep, who would believe in such nonsense, given the current state of the planet in 13k years.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/the-deadly-diseases-b...
The way I see it, the period from 1945 to 2020 was the exception, not the norm. Apart from that period (in the Western World), humans have been facing more difficult times than 2020-2022 through most of history. Still we have surivived, and at times, prospered.
In the future, we may face disasters (climate change, pandemics, wars) that are hundreds of times worse than covid. Still none of those (except possibly nuclear war at some point) are likely to be the end of humanity, or even set us back so much that we are completely unable to record history. (A big nuclear war today would perhaps be a setback for human knowledge of history comparable to the loss of the librariy in Alexandria)
There are still existential threats. One may be if we build millions of new nukes and use them all at once. Others could be technological (AI, nanotech), yet other could come from space (asteroids, aliens).
But for humanity to be wiped out by pandemics or climate change seems highly unlikely.
Now you got me thinking about this. Perhaps that period was a technological "sweet spot." Technology assisted us in our tasks. It wasn't too primitive where it hindered us like the periods prior. On the flip side, we were not overly reliant on that assistance like perhaps we are now (think chip shortages disrupting nearly every facet of life).
Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact? Even if the same proportion of the population were, it may have been not so great of a stress as supplies may have stretched longer.
Maybe, but I really doubt that. I find it much more likely that it was a combination of luck and culture. (Or rather of a culture that had not yet been corrupted.)
Anyway, even Corona was an extremely minor disaster, in the grand scope of things. In terms of years of life lost, the average per capita number is in the order of between a few days and a couple of weeks. Had corona been spreading in 1946, it would hardly have been noticed.
By comparison, the Black Death probably caused average life expectancy to fall by something like 20 years, globally for those alive when it started to spread. In other words, Covid was less than 1% as serious as the Black Death for the average person.
> Also, population growth. The planet is significantly more populated. For example, had this baby formula shortage happened during a period of less population, could it have had less of an impact?
Most people througout history would be completely unable to grasp why we make a fuss about things like the baby formula shortage. They were used to child mortality in the order of 50%, even in peacetime. Lack of baby formula in the US may perhaps cause the child mortality rate to go up by 0.000001%.
If I have a concern, it is not that we are living through difficult times now. We are not, these are still some of the best time in human history (for the average person, even in most developing countries). Rather my concern, is that most people have NO CLUE how much worse it can get.
I don't mean the semi-religious concern that you can find surrounding climate change, or a fatalist view on nuclear war. This kind of fatalism tends to just passify people, make them shrug, and say "if it happens, we're all dead anyway".
I mean for people to actually imagine living in a world where it is normal for your children to die from starvation, where there are no medicines. Where the infection in your thumb that you got from working in the fields until your hands were bleeding can actually kill you. Where packs of wolf-dogs roam the cities to feed on human corpses, many of them carrying rabies.
I mean in particular the willingness so many people seem to have to tear down our institutions that work very well, because they identify some minor flaw. Their willingness to polarize politically, the re-emergance of both facist and communist ideas to conveniently place the blame for our small problems on the "Others". And finally the signs that countries once again seem to be willing to use military force to annex other nations, for no other reason than nationalism.
I don't predict that any of this will lead to human extinction, but I'm worried that within 100-200 years we will see a conflict that will completely eclipse WW2, with 500million or more deaths.
THIS is why I call myself a pessimist, because I see it as likely (or not as unlikely as I would like) that humanity will return to a state that is, in fact, more or less the average of what humanity has experienced up until now, while most people seem to take it for granted that the near-Utopian (EDIT) situation we have now will remain mostly as it is.
I really think it was all the aftermath of WWII. That was such a catastrophic event with all that "never forget", that instead of going for war, peace was the better solution at any cost (for west and central Europe). Now as the remembrance is waning, military options become increasingly an option. The germans shipping heavy military equipment? Unthinkable 10 years ago.
In other words, the 1945-2020 period required "luck" in a number of dimensions, and should be considered a fluke, not the norm.
We’re just not used to dealing with a disease like this. It was a serious problem, but the idea that it was any kind of existential threat is absurdly hyperbolic.
The Spanish flu was similarly dangerous and virulent, it’s impact was vastly greater, yet for most people it’s a forgotten historical footnote.
It did, it was central banks by pressing money, who held the faith in economy high. There would, and time will tell, should have been some more companies default.
In a matter of just three years we rethought how we work, live, travel, and socialize. The global community came up with a vaccine in an extraordinarily short amount of time, and then coordinated a roll out.
We've seen how humanity can adapt at scale when we are motivated. I don't know what answer we will have to the ecological ruin we have layed out. Maybe we don't have an answer to it, that will be a truly humbling moment.
Umm... - Smallpox eradication was a global effort. - Polio eradication was a global effort.(unfortunately delayed by religious fanatics in a small number of countries)
Also it’s worth noting that the vaccines were already years into development before COVID hit. We knew there was a risk of a Coronavirus outbreak (by virtue of the fact that we had dodged two Coronavirus pandemics a decade earlier). Granted the increased funding and urgency of COVID helped speed things along; but they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.
So it’s still not really clear how we would cope with a more dramatic or unknown situation.
What I did learn about the pandemic was normal folk will completely disregard their own safety just to stick a middle finger to the government. Which is not only concerning for the future survival of our species but also a direct contradiction to your point about civilisation banding together.
In Yuval Noah Harari's book 'Sapiens - a Brief History of Humankind' he posits that there was a 'cognitive revolution' about 70k years ago, during which our cognitive & language capabilities moved beyond the purely physical observations, to the more abstract & metaphysical.
This allowed for a shedload of cultural changes -- larger societies, the birth of religions / mythologies, money, etc. All those abstract concepts that work when we all agree they exist even if they actually don't.
To your question - yes, we necessarily only have written history from civilisations that wrote things down (and those things survived), but it seems like there was an evolutionary change that meant we could finally leverage our one distinctly useful skill, coordinating large groups of people at scale, by getting us all to adopt a shared reality that didn't exist yet. (This kind of explains why we adopted agriculture, despite it clearly being a bad idea at the time.)
“Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe? Again, there are more questions than answers. Crucially, however, we do now have tentative hints as to the actual religion of these people.
In Gobekli Tepe several skulls have been recovered. They are deliberately defleshed, and carefully pierced with holes so they could – supposedly – be hung and displayed.
Skull cults are not unknown in ancient Anatolia. If there was such a cult in the Tas Tepeler it might explain the graven vultures pictured ‘playing’ with human heads. As to how the skulls were obtained, they might have come from conflict (though there is no evidence of this yet), it is quite possible the skulls were obtained via human sacrifice. At a nearby, slightly younger site, the Skull Building of Cayonu, we know of altars drenched with human blood, probably from gory sacrifice.”
Sorry to jump in half way and mostly uninformed, but maybe that's an early form of sky burial? Burial by carrion birds is still practiced today.
(a) is such a belief really compatible with what we think is the selective force of evolution, i.e. stay alive long enough to make sure your children have children? In other words, is this something people truly feel when it comes down to it, or is it just a story they tell each other in low-stakes situations? and
(b) even if I believed in this, that's orthogonal to my belief that every human has a valuable role to play in this, current-life society!
Your argument about selective pressure would by the same logic lead one to conclude chaste nuns can't exist and monestaries and vows of celebacy are fiction.
Religious belief just needs to be useful on average for there to be selective pressure.
Also evolutionary psychologists can't really explain the existence of gay people (attempts to do so have been a stretch, according to the evolutionary psychiatrist author of The Moral Animal) which demonstrates the limits of declaring things are impossible due to thought experiments about evolutionary pressure.
The Aztecs sacrificed an estimated tens of thousands of people a year, because they believed it would postpone the next apocalypse in which everyone would die
incentives drives us
overpopulation was controlled by sacrifice and infanticide
Through virtually all of history, there's a strong correlation between "more people" and "better living conditions".
We are a social species. We're practically made to effectively make use of as many of us as possible to preserve ourselves.
That's survivorship bias. Populations always try to grow, not to shrink. However, growth will only occur when possible (due new technologies or more resources being available).
The last agricultural famine in England was only in the 17th century.
https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
One of the many notions from Lingua ex Machina [2001] is the evolution from protolanguage to proper language. From nonrecursive verb-noun clauses to recursive subject-verb-noun clauses.
https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Machina-Reconciling-Darwin-Cho...
That book had so many intriguing open ended questions, before we had the tech (ability) to verify stuff. IIRC, others were:
the way the neocortex is organized into hexagonal columns, which I think is what Jeff Hawkins (et al) is working on;
how notions compete inside our head using Darwinian processes;
how thinking (consciousness) may be like resonance across our brains, like a song.
Thanks again for the link. Am noob, so just barely grasp this stuff, but am excited nonetheless to learn about more recent findings.
We live in an age of miracles.
--
Summary copypasta from Amazon:
A neuroscientist and a linguist show how evolution could have given rise to structured language.
A machine for language? Certainly, say the neurophysiologists, busy studying the language specializations of the human brain and trying to identify their evolutionary antecedents. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky talk about machinelike "modules" in the brain for syntax, arguing that language is more an instinct (a complex behavior triggered by simple environmental stimuli) than an acquired skill like riding a bicycle.
But structured language presents the same evolutionary problems as feathered forelimbs for flight: you need a lot of specializations to fly even a little bit. How do you get them, if evolution has no foresight and the intermediate stages do not have intermediate payoffs? Some say that the Darwinian scheme for gradual species self-improvement cannot explain our most valued human capability, the one that sets us so far above the apes, language itself.
William Calvin and Derek Bickerton suggest that other evolutionary developments, not directly related to language, allowed language to evolve in a way that eventually promoted a Chomskian syntax. They compare these intermediate behaviors to the curb-cuts originally intended for wheelchair users. Their usefulness was soon discovered by users of strollers, shopping carts, rollerblades, and so on. The authors argue that reciprocal altruism and ballistic movement planning were "curb-cuts" that indirectly promoted the formation of structured language. Written in the form of a dialogue set in Bellagio, Italy, Lingua ex Machina presents an engaging challenge to those who view the human capacity for language as a winner-take-all war between Chomsky and Darwin.
However, our genetic form may have been very different. It seems that lactase persistence[0] was not wide spread in nearly any human population until the domestication of animals.
I know that comes off as a bit pedantic, but sometimes those little genetic variations matter quite a bit. I won't cop to being well read in paleogenetics, but I have a feeling that there's been a lot of evolution between them and us.
What characterizes civilizations is the emergence of stratified societies in those settlements, with specialized classes of people such as priests and metalworkers, who relied on others to provide them with food.
_pass the salt_