It still blows my mind that a human that lived 100,000 years ago was anatomically modern. I take that to mean that we could've taken one at birth and raised it in a modern home and it could've grown up to receive a physics PhD. In other words, a human 100,000+ years ago was 100% capable of understanding general relativity, or how to design and construct the Saturn V rocket, or any other modern STEM topic. What were we doing for all those years banging bones with round rocks? There must've been a lot of intellectually frustrated people.
> There must've been a lot of intellectually frustrated people.
This is funny. As if they were just hanging around with the luxury to want to be challenged.
They didn't live very long, their lives were harsh, they were probably banging out kids at an unbelievable rate.
There's something just fantastically out of touch about your statement here. Very silver platter.
Even now, there are much more intelligent people than you or I with no time or resources for intellectual pursuits, and following that, no particular drive either.
If you're hungry and your living conditions are risky, you probably don't care about lacanian this or knot topography that. Much too busy.
I recall a study of 'primitive' people of the Amazon, vs the 'modern' Japanese farmer. The primitives spend 3-4 hours a day foraging, and the rest at leisure. The farmer spent 10-hour days with 4 or 5 holidays per year. And lived in simple wooden huts as well.
Depending on the environment, ancient people's lives didn't have to be nasty, brutish and short. Leave that to the modern overcrowded slum.
The interesting question is how much physical effort was required to forage and hunt, and did that necessitate rest due to the lack of nutritional value offered by said food. Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel right now. The value of agriculture would have been that it allowed food to scale so that other members of society could specialize in something, develop knowledge, and use it, including metalwork, soldiering, scholarship, etc. That type of specialization was not possible when everyone was focused on being a hunter gatherer to survive, especially given that nutrition options were poor in most parts of the world compared to where agriculture did take off.
I see what you're saying, but if the logic held all the way through, and you believe the previous commentor's claims about intellectually frustrated people, then the obvious result would be that those people were doing things like taking on ethics, math, religion, and science in concrete ways. I'm not an archeologist or anthropologist, but I don't recall any particular advancements in anything really, from that era. Better huts. Minor improvements in tools. Where were the windmills? Why didn't they come up with gearing for mechanical leverage? Long term structures and joinery?
I get that we have a lot of intellectual force multipliers now, so the achievement of a few propagates and impacts more than similar intellectual leaps in the, past, but given the kind of advancements we know one person is capable of making, there was remarkably little progress during all of this supposed leisure time.
'Soft' civilizations that didn't work in stone are nearly completely lost. Nobody going to find a knotted rope representing algebra or combinatorics lessons, or going to understand what it was without written instructions?
More on point, if all of these intellectuals were hanging out in the amazon, bored, why didn't they come up with long term data storage like clay tablets and writing? Why didn't they write their combinatorics proofs in stone? I know you're not really saying they had combinatorics, but a few millennia of frustrated brain boxes should leave some kind of legacy, especially in the totally physical space they lived and worked in.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
And then the fisherman dies from blood infection at 42, leaving his kids working at the age of 10. The kids like reading about sciences but can’t find time to do so. This story repeats for centuries.
You make a good point that too many current humans have the same problem, or lack motivation, but the silver platter/out of touch barb wasn't necessary.
> banging out kids at an unbelievable rate
That's not actually helpful. Some stats would be good. I did a quick search for number of offspring for the yanomami but found nothing.
I remember this little theory where in some ancient cultures children would be weaned around age six and the mothers would only become fertile again after that. I'm not sure how established the mechanicas are, but the theory says that hormonal pathways where breastfeeding causes infertility are activated by scant nutrition. It sounds like an effective way to adjust births to the available resources.
Breastfeeding does reduce odds of conception but it doesn't really last more than a year. Plenty of people get pregnant while breastfeeding.
I dunno, original poster mentioned scant nutrition being a condition for an extended effect so mayyyybe, seems like it would not be very hard to study today.
They were trying to figure out how to survive in a harsh world filled with deadly predators -- without the benefit of sharp claws, poisonous fangs, heavy muscles, thick fur, or any other advantage normally afforded to their competitors. That meant learning, for example, how wind and gravity affect the trajectory of a spear through the air. It's not rocket science but it's close enough :p
