So naturally every generation or at least every hundred years or so there's always been an Einstein, Tesla, or DaVinci come along.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

4000 years is a long time, and our civilization will likely be gone, nothing but ruins.

Quick who was the first kind of England, and who started or ran the east India trading company?

The extreme is the Lurie Family which can “trace” part of it’s lineage back 3,000 years and that was with paper records. (700 years of that is well documented, prior to that is less certain.)

Things may fade even faster even if we have written record of it.

The geniuses of the Stone Age did little things, like finding better ways to make fire, flint knap, leather processing, weaving and looms, tent making, taming animals, inventing the wheel, food preservation, which plants were good for what ailments. You know, all the stuff you need without question.

In terms of impact both are huge, Fabrice's works are a marvel and Hyke's repackaging of ELF with YAML is considered business genius - he could sell anything I'm sure.

Some dude named "Bob" who lives in a trailer in the woods and never talks to anyone.

You definitely would expect to see a proportional number of outliers on a time scale.

Also, human population was very small in the old days: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#world-pop...

Which would mean that also about 7% of all geniuses ever are currently alive, and thanks to modern agriculture most of them are not stuck farming.

These ‘blueprints’ are preserved because they were carved in rock. All the thousands of years of prior art of scratching lines in the dirt are lost to time.

I suspect the Neolithic people were more than capable of hunting and catching game without these structures.

Looks like it's going to exist in some form and not be liquidated.

As for how we know they're not walls, that's easy: they're not tall enough. As someone who's excavated enough stone walls, it takes a much bigger pile than that to build human-scale walls, and far more if you want them to have any sort of defensive capability.

Also worth noting that you don't actually need to pen animals to domesticate them. It has a lot of advantages (e.g. separating them from predators), but it's not required and may even be disadvantageous if you're a (semi-)nomadic pastoralist.

That said... given appropriate materials (eg flexible wooden rods for hurdles and fences)... Pens within the kite seems pretty possible. Idk if they had a reason to pen animals... but even giving yourself more time to process meat might be reason enough.

Some US "buffalo jump" sites and accounts suggest a lot of waste. Processing a bison is a lot of work.

If you want 20 people to turn 50 camels into dried/salted/processed meat efficiently... you need a few days.

Meanwhile... a handful of kids standing on walls could probably contain a herd in of these kites for a few days, even if it couldn't contain the herd without supervision.

Also... They had ropes and such.

That requires such high level thinking. They’re really putting themselves in the mind of the scared animal in designing something like this.

I’m fully aware that people of this era did not have the mentality of toddlers, but there’s still something to be said for the level of social development and communication that must be present to convince a large group of folks to build out one of these things.

We have to remember that it’s humans we're talking about here, and that this wasn’t exactly that long ago. They would have had the same cognitive potential as us, if not more simply because we’re lazy ungrateful creatures living in a level of comfort that royalty of old could not even imagine. The cost of a mistake in their “real world” was often death, and they _had_ to get it right so that their family didn’t die.

People can spontaneously self organise and achieve all sorts of things “on the spot”, kids in the playground do this daily- making up fun games without any parental input. I don’t believe you need a whole level of social development beyond “I won’t kill you, let’s be friends” to achieve great things. This becomes complicated as groups grow of course, but I would imagine most of us have experienced this on some level.

Necessity is the mother of innovation. Doing something the hard/impossible way a few times will force you to be creative, especially when you need to feed your family/group.

You have to emphasize with an animal to track it, for example. Even non human hunters have such intuitions. A wildcat knows when a squirrel is likely to head for the nearest tree.

By the time such structures were being built, coralling using simpler or natural terrain features was probably an important hunting method.

Imo the notable part here is the scale and it's implications. Large groups. Long term projects. Long lived assets. A progressive mindset, where the "economy" and roles within it change. That's not, seemingly, the default.

I don't have as much specific knowledge of kites in particular, but based on similar structures elsewhere they almost certainly weren't continuously used and maintained. They would likely be used for one or two seasons, then abandoned for potentially decades at a time as the migrations shifted. When herds eventually returned to the area, people would likely go out and do some restoration ahead of the herds. That would be things like re-excavating the pits, replacing any decayed brush/sticks in the terminal funnels, repairing pit walls, and so on. You can't skip parts or animals may escape and the structure may be covered in all manner of brush or sediment that makes identification difficult on the ground.

It's not necessary to have a plan for the kite, but it would still be pretty useful, especially if it's one that's rarely used so most of the people present might have never seen it.

The study [0] mentions that they dated charcoal that they have reason to believe was contemporaneous.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

This can only be fully seen from the sky struck me as somewhat odd, almost downplaying that all in all mammals and even simpler species are really good in basic navigation. I mean going from A to B and back among various lines if we've never done so before or even if we've done before but suddenly there are obstacles in between, is no problem for us. Unlike for, say, some of my chickens or simple AI models. Doesn't really matter if we can see the whole picture from the sky or not. In fact doing so without seeing the whole picture is exactly part of the skill? Or is this perhaps a comment about drawing such route? Ok that's a bit more specialist, but the accuracy in historic maps shows it's a skill we've had for a long time. And this dicovery might just be the earliest proof of it.

It's German, but shouldn't matter much in th days of AI.

ChatGPT anwsers to some questions brought up here based on the NZZ article:

1. The "Desert Kites" or stone structures were dated using two methods. The researchers used Carbon-14 (C14) dating on charcoal samples found near the structures. Carbon-14 dating can only be used on once-living material like wood or bone, hence its use on the charcoal. They also used a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time sand grains were exposed to sunlight, based on the accumulation of electrons in their crystal structure. These two techniques revealed that the structures are between 7560 and 9000 years old.

2. Your instinct aligns with the interpretations of the researchers. The article suggests that the rock carvings depicting these structures may have been created after their construction rather than as blueprints. One reason for this is that the physical structures follow topography, incorporating or based on terrain features which are not reflected in the plans. The researchers propose that these drawings could have been used for hunting planning, demonstrating attributes of the structures that aren't noticeable from ground level. Also, they argue these drawings could serve as a demonstration of knowledge, the ability to depict spatial elements, and the act of transmitting this knowledge. The idea that these could be plans created before construction is less likely but not entirely dismissed.