The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions. Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
I was really interested in seeing what's the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime!
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
Graeber and Wengrow contest that take severely with their survey of modern anthro and archaeological research, I recommend their papers or Dawn of Everything
The knowledge a person can acquire and bring to next generation is key here. The more organized, free and widespread this knowledge is, the higher the probability it will survive.
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
I think the most obvious explanation, one that doesn't even require much imagination because it just coincides with the very concept of history and pre-history, is that people lost a lot of stuff when only oral tradition was kept and the threshold of complexity that could be reproduced reliably over generations was rather small and also asymmetric: stuff that could be kept inside of tales of general interest could be carried much further in space and time than things that would be specific or narrow in audience.
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
> So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal
And then even more rapidly with the printing press and regular, reliable mail services.
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege?
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
And most importantly: who controlled that new invention.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.
I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check.
This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism.
This is also incorrect:
> The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females.
Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game.
The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible.
This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources.
>> The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food.
That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
> The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
Did you miss the fact that the same pattern was observed in multiple societies, by multiple researchers, in places as far as Australia and Papua New Ghinea?
Really good article, and yet another newsletter/blog I feel compelled to subscribe to yet probably never read (sigh).
> What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc.
All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
It's not a very good article - it's just a lot of projection based on a single example.
Human societies did develop significantly over that time frame - e.g. the discovery that plants could be cultivated and bred to improve their desirable quantities was one breakthrough that happened >10K years ago, the steady development of more complex language and ultimately the recording of language in written form - it's just that there might not be much of a historical record of these developments. Almost the only thing that's been preserved are the stone tools, which also show a steady improvement over time.
What exactly did you find good about the article? Sounds like the author just over extended observations from one tribe to all of human history. Maybe it’s true but it sure as hell ain’t substantiated. So we invented tools discovered fire and then just went back to dragging women by their hair to caves for 500K years? Or maybe there’s more nuance in it.
Indeed, I was talking just the other day with someone who mentioned that machines will never do X like humans. I simply had to say that never is a long time. If you are a physicalist who believes that the physical state of the brain determines consciousness and thought, then there really is nothing special about humans that we couldn't replicate given enough technological skill.
In 1987, Alcida Ramos--an anthropologist who had worked with the Yanomami--published a terrific article going over what she recognized about them in other texts, including Chagnon's, but more importantly pointing out the degree to which each ethnographer's selective emphasis yields a very different overall picture. Although not too surprising, it's a useful summary for anyone who only knows the Yanomami from one point of view, and it offers a sense of what an anthropologist sees in other work about a group they've worked with themselves--rare insight. Her article is called "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic," and for the moment, it's online at http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/...
Interesting that this post came out only 12 hours after this similar question on reddit was asked (but I suppose coincidences are bound to happen)[0].
The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life.
Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures.
This feels a bit like Baader–Meinhof phenomena to me, just after reading on reddit /r/explainlikeimfive earlier today but with a different perspective.
> about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence
That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
> The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down.
Is 20% loss really enough to keep populations down?
If every woman has 3 children, then populations inceases by 50% in each generation. Losing 20% will not keep the population stable.
What if every woman has more children?
Missing in the pictore presented by the article is the birth rate, and other causes of death.
It is not evident the wars are keeping the Yanomamö population stable.
Also I don't believe animal populatios are stabilized by conflicts within same species.
And I heard from a hunter that the population of wild boars and other hunting animals depends mostly on food availability.
> That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
Author mentions that primitive societies living in abundance don't have 50/50 most likely to female infanticide. If low number of working women can provide resources it's more important to have more male warriors to defend the group. Excess of women would just get stolen by another group if men numbers in the group got too low.
Also the idea that a non-catastrophic reduction in the male population would affect the size of the next generation is probably wrong. If we assume a lack of strict monogamy, that is (probably a reasonable assumption?).
These conclusions only apply to the tropics where you have no seasons are very little seasons and where the loose tropical soil can be easily maintained with hoe agriculture by the women... Up north in Europe where you have harsh Winters where the soil is hard and thick and where it must be plowed requiring strength and so forth, it's an entirely different story. Better notice the author did not say this did not mention this comparison. I wonder why
It is not surprising to me that Chagnon was cancelled over false accusations, which were accepted with undue credulity by his colleagues. As this author alludes, and my own experience has also shown, too much of anthropology seems to have an unfortunate culture of gossip-driven ideological conformity. Dissent from the party line, and it will be discovered, one way or another, that you are a Bad Person.
The author seems to act as if primitive man faced an equal choice: agriculture, or hunting and gathering. He says they chose the latter because it's easier, given the larger land availability.
This is only half the equation: domesticating today's agricultural products took tens of thousands of years. And throughout the interim, that process of learning must have gotten broken dozens of times until it finally resulted in something resembling the plants which can sustain a civilization. Normal wild wheat, for example, is unharvestable. Its seeds just drift away into the wind.
I'm surprised he ignores this, but it's a pretty glaring flaw in his argument.
So many assumptions and biases, even using moral terms like greed. This sounds very smart but to me it has no substance.
The first rule of living is you want to continue living. The author and anthropoligists seem to rediscover this in different ways and marvel at thr fact for some reason. They don't understand that reproduction is a means through which one continues to live. This is true for anything that lives.
Comparisons with chimpanzees and all of that is silly. The core fact doesn't change.
I don't get why they won't ask themselves about belief and how different beliefs contributed to development. Perhaps because in modern western culture that term is synonymous with imagination and fairytales?
The tribe he described had a buffer zone and raided anyone they found threatening. Kind of like the british and japanese with their islands and invasions of the mainland whenever they felt threatened. Yet they are the most developed.
Developlment patterns in the past few thounsand years are such that war and conflict is the fuel of develpment and innovation. Because humans like any creature want to live and continue to live and live well we have conflicts and to gain the upperhand in conflicts new developments are born.
The question that was not answered for me after reading this post is why "300k years"? Because people could afford to just move elsewhere in most circumstances?
Misinterpretation of Chagnon’s work. Read The Dawn of Everything for more on this. So-called “primitive” societies have been experimenting with things other than material technology (e.g. different ways of organizing themselves) for much of that time. There’s a reason colonists often defected to Native American tribes despite their lifestyles being less comfortable in certain material ways.
There is a distinction between human tribes that lived in permanent locations and human tribes that were nomadic. Over the 300k years that this article cites its likely that the majority of human tribes were nomadic because as the resources of any give location were used up the tribe had to move on likely following a relatively well known seasonal route. During this phase their primary dangers were wild animal rather than other tribes.
The technology made a big change was the domestication of dogs which happened around 70k years ago genetics suggests. This was a symbiotic relationship that worked very well. Dogs could help with defense of wild animals, finding food, guarding infants etc. In return the dogs and humans were more effective hunters than either was on their own.
This relationship was the spark that freed humans' time to progress in many ways. It probably would have happened sooner if the wild dogs of Africa could be domesticated but to my knowledge they could not.
This seems... maybe too handwavy. His core theory is that "intra-culture violence keeps populations down, ergo there's no food pressure, nor impetus to increase food production". And the evidence there is quite frankly really weak. He cites just one number (~20% of the population studied died from violence), and that isn't extrapolated in any way to actual population size estimates.
Also it seems to ignore the Darwinian angle here: it doesn't matter whether or not a culture "needs" to develop agriculture, the second one does its overwhelming size will destroy its neighbors. We see this effect with damn near 100% rates everywhere in the world it happened. So that seems like a poor analysis. Really at best this is just arguing for an unstable equilibrium waiting for someone to start planting.
I dunno. This is heavy on the "feels right" and really light on the analysis. I'd steer clear.
Who is this person and why should I care about their musings? The fields of anthropology and evolutionary psychology have enough controversy and differing opinions among the experts to waste time reading overly confident conjectures from some rando who doesn’t even give their last name.
This is phrased harshly but is a good point. Who is this person and why do their musing merit attention? Have they done decades of research on this field and staked their reputation on this position, or are they another person on the internet with an opinion?
It seems a bit naïf to assume that nothing happened during that time. Gaining a whole lot more sentience is a big adjustment. We have to build language, build teaching methods, figure out how, to cooperate via trade and so on, master parenting of sentient creatures, notice patterns in the year and seasons and maybe decades and so on. I mean maybe nothing happened, but it seems like the first order assumption would be there is a lot that goes into modern society and it took time to develop. We can see for ourselves that new inventions and methods can speed up cultural rates of change and adaptability, so it makes sense the groundwork would be filled in slowly.
[+] [-] retrac|3 years ago|reply
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
[+] [-] mmoskal|3 years ago|reply
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
[0] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a... [1] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7...
[+] [-] dopidopHN|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think it can be qualified of fast.
Their was back and forth and things did not change rapidly for the better automagically.
For milenaries, hunter gathered were better fed than village dweller ( from bones structures and trash analysis)
Source : Grabber & scott. Mostly “against the grain” and “debt, a history”
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signalToNose|3 years ago|reply
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
[+] [-] muyuu|3 years ago|reply
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
[+] [-] weaksauce|3 years ago|reply
reminds me of universal paperclip in a weird way. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
[+] [-] johnnymorgan|3 years ago|reply
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
[+] [-] andrei_says_|3 years ago|reply
Also, you have my vote for establishing “hour of collective mental wankery” as a measurement unit.
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
Some are engaged but how many are just mindlessly scrolling addictive algorithmically curated trash?
[+] [-] soared|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DubiousPusher|3 years ago|reply
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
[+] [-] ramblenode|3 years ago|reply
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
[+] [-] simonh|3 years ago|reply
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
[+] [-] oliverbennett|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
[+] [-] coffeeblack|3 years ago|reply
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
[+] [-] tspike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacob171714|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faitswulff|3 years ago|reply
This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism.
This is also incorrect:
> The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females.
Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|3 years ago|reply
However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game.
The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible.
This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources.
http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/origins_of_culture/
https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
[+] [-] brabel|3 years ago|reply
Did you miss the fact that the same pattern was observed in multiple societies, by multiple researchers, in places as far as Australia and Papua New Ghinea?
[+] [-] maroonblazer|3 years ago|reply
> What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc.
All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
Human societies did develop significantly over that time frame - e.g. the discovery that plants could be cultivated and bred to improve their desirable quantities was one breakthrough that happened >10K years ago, the steady development of more complex language and ultimately the recording of language in written form - it's just that there might not be much of a historical record of these developments. Almost the only thing that's been preserved are the stone tools, which also show a steady improvement over time.
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satvikpendem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhte415|3 years ago|reply
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/feed
[+] [-] ChainOfFools|3 years ago|reply
this premise, which indeed does operate largely without conscious acknowledgement, is the basis of belief in human rights.
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
Not necessarily true. Train a GPT on monkey sounds and you'll get a completely different result.
[+] [-] WobbuPalooza|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satvikpendem|3 years ago|reply
The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life.
Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures.
[0] https://www.old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6...
[+] [-] stevenwoo|3 years ago|reply
ELI5: If humans have been in our current form for 250,000 years, why did it take so long for us to progress yet once it began it's in hyperspeed? https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/...
[+] [-] hownottowrite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avodonosov|3 years ago|reply
That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
> The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down.
Is 20% loss really enough to keep populations down? If every woman has 3 children, then populations inceases by 50% in each generation. Losing 20% will not keep the population stable.
What if every woman has more children?
Missing in the pictore presented by the article is the birth rate, and other causes of death.
It is not evident the wars are keeping the Yanomamö population stable.
Also I don't believe animal populatios are stabilized by conflicts within same species.
And I heard from a hunter that the population of wild boars and other hunting animals depends mostly on food availability.
[+] [-] narag|3 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-i...
And as close as my grandparents' generation, half of their siblings died before ten.
[+] [-] scotty79|3 years ago|reply
Author mentions that primitive societies living in abundance don't have 50/50 most likely to female infanticide. If low number of working women can provide resources it's more important to have more male warriors to defend the group. Excess of women would just get stolen by another group if men numbers in the group got too low.
[+] [-] pfannkuchen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BigCryo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulusthe|3 years ago|reply
This is only half the equation: domesticating today's agricultural products took tens of thousands of years. And throughout the interim, that process of learning must have gotten broken dozens of times until it finally resulted in something resembling the plants which can sustain a civilization. Normal wild wheat, for example, is unharvestable. Its seeds just drift away into the wind.
I'm surprised he ignores this, but it's a pretty glaring flaw in his argument.
[+] [-] badrabbit|3 years ago|reply
The first rule of living is you want to continue living. The author and anthropoligists seem to rediscover this in different ways and marvel at thr fact for some reason. They don't understand that reproduction is a means through which one continues to live. This is true for anything that lives.
Comparisons with chimpanzees and all of that is silly. The core fact doesn't change.
I don't get why they won't ask themselves about belief and how different beliefs contributed to development. Perhaps because in modern western culture that term is synonymous with imagination and fairytales?
The tribe he described had a buffer zone and raided anyone they found threatening. Kind of like the british and japanese with their islands and invasions of the mainland whenever they felt threatened. Yet they are the most developed.
Developlment patterns in the past few thounsand years are such that war and conflict is the fuel of develpment and innovation. Because humans like any creature want to live and continue to live and live well we have conflicts and to gain the upperhand in conflicts new developments are born.
The question that was not answered for me after reading this post is why "300k years"? Because people could afford to just move elsewhere in most circumstances?
[+] [-] xrcws|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropicgravity|3 years ago|reply
The technology made a big change was the domestication of dogs which happened around 70k years ago genetics suggests. This was a symbiotic relationship that worked very well. Dogs could help with defense of wild animals, finding food, guarding infants etc. In return the dogs and humans were more effective hunters than either was on their own.
This relationship was the spark that freed humans' time to progress in many ways. It probably would have happened sooner if the wild dogs of Africa could be domesticated but to my knowledge they could not.
[+] [-] ajross|3 years ago|reply
Also it seems to ignore the Darwinian angle here: it doesn't matter whether or not a culture "needs" to develop agriculture, the second one does its overwhelming size will destroy its neighbors. We see this effect with damn near 100% rates everywhere in the world it happened. So that seems like a poor analysis. Really at best this is just arguing for an unstable equilibrium waiting for someone to start planting.
I dunno. This is heavy on the "feels right" and really light on the analysis. I'd steer clear.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Seattle3503|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanstin|3 years ago|reply