Everything we do is built on top of something else. We needed to build a society capable of supporting industry and learning, then written language, mathematics etc.
Once you have the building blocks of society, everything else comes much faster.
Crop domestication
anon assumes development of science and tech is linear
It’s exponential. The gap between 200k years ago and 10k years ago is pretty similar to the gap between 20k years ago and 1k years ago, or the difference between 2k years ago and 100 years ago. On a logarithmic scale, same distance, roughly the same delta in terms of the technology available
Which is why I think it’s wild people want to throw on the brakes now that we’re affecting the entire earth. I mean I understand that it seems like we’ve ended up in a bad spot ecologically if you only take the last 100 years into account. But why stop right on the most toxic version of humanity? Let’s push forward to our solarpunk future as soon as possible.
The answer is probably language. Before advanced language was developed, there wasn’t a good way to pass along any knowledge that was gained by an individual.
As IoaExMachina correctly highlighted, language predates those 10k years.
For reference, Proto-Afro-Asiatic (ancestor of Egyptian, all Semitic languages, Amazigh, plus a lot others) is believed to have been spoken 12k~18k years ago. So… like, it was already old back then, and yet it has modern descendants.
And the role of language is probably not just communication, it’s also to formalise thought. It’s easier to think with language than without it, and you can reach more reliable conclusions.
I thought it was because proper farming.
Like being able to support larger groups of people, where individuals could specialize in other things than hunting, gathering and whatever else was keeping the early humans busy.
On the other hand I’ve heard we’ve been possibly farming long before 10,000 BCE.
Language probably predates Homo Sapiens as our close relatives such as Homo Neandertalensis and Homo Denisova also had adaptations for articulated speech.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01391-6
Beside, populations today that have never had agriculture or traits we associate with civilization and who live secluded, like the North Sentinelese, all have languages.
I think it’s best explained by environmental factors, rather than something interior to humanity. After all, most of human’s existence was during the Pleistocene, but all recorded history is within the Holocene (except now we’re entering the Anthropocene). Many modern studies account for the climate shifts to explain the development of agriculture:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1113931109
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959683611409775
Most traits we associate with civilization are linked to agriculture and sedentary.
And storage / dissemination of that language.
Thats why the fediverse is the next step in evolution.
Brainrotmaxxing
Let’s carve our memes into stone and bury them for future archaeologists.
4chan knows how to destroy it but nobody had made the effort lol.
Language is much older than just 10k years. There’s a few reasons to think that language might have developed with erectus, which could make language 10x older than the ‘human specie’, according to anon.
That’s why i said advanced language. Lots of animals have language. Crows have language
Usually the distinction is between “advanced communication” which some animals display, and “language”, which only humans have.
Whether you want to call it language or advanced language, what we do today is way older than 10k years. There are stories that have been dated to 100k and if the arguments about erectus are correct, then what you call advanced language is probably 2m+ years old.
The answer is agriculture, which lowered the standard of living and health of the individual, but sustained more people, allowed for specialization, permanent settlement and building large structures.
Yes there’s only one answer to how our species developed space flight
… wizards!
Civilization is anomalous. Yes.
It was mostly agriculture and dense human settlements, I think. Once you have someone farming enough food for themself plus someone else, that “someone else” can do something else to progress technology. Sometimes with things that allow that farmer to produce enough food for three people, then five, so goes on.
Yup, aliens.
Raising cattle is more efficient when it has its own cattle! And crops.
guess what happens next
more food and more people who came to buy the food now you need people to help make the food and keep track of the sales and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there’s more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there’s more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there’s business, money, writing, laws, power
Right, the history of human progress is literally the history of human cooperation. As the scale of human cooperation has expanded so has the scope of the problems we can solve.
We are actually quite close to having something resembling global consensus on a bunch of issues. It is only a handful of notable holdout states which are standing in the way of humanity effectively being able to draw down arms and focus on bigger issues.
Kurtzgesagt
coming soon to a dank river valley near you
Pretty sure we had a triage stage during the whole prehistory to get to our point to randomly get an individual violent and cunning enough to survive the wilds and other competitors but helpful and sociable enough to survive within it’s tribe.
My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person’s work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.
I think that’s a generally accepted idea.
Your don’t need to only rely on reason for that.
It’s quite obvious it’s true when looking at history.
“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings” is a really stupid saying, unless one truly does think of the devil as the Lightbringer.
Honestly the more one reads into history, the more one realises just how progress stifling Christianity has been. (Or Abrahamic monotheism in the first place.)
When the people around modern day Greece started having extra fish and wine so some of the ppl could take it easy and just chilax, they basically came up with the central ideas that are still central to our modern society. Democracy, morality, freedom, etc.
Oldest stone axes are like a million years.
We’re not the first smart species.
I just looked this up because it sounds fake and guess what…
Looks like it is!
What is?
That there are tools older than a million years?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan
The Oldowan (or Mode I) was a widespread stone tool archaeological industry (style) in prehistory. These early tools were simple, usually made by chipping off one, or a few, flakes off using another stone. Oldowan tools were used during the Lower Paleolithic period, 2.9 million years ago up until at least 1.7 million years ago (Ma), by ancient Hominins (early humans) across much of Africa. This technological industry was followed by the more sophisticated Acheulean industry (two sites associated with Homo erectus at Gona in the Afar Region of Ethiopia dating from 1.5 and 1.26 million years ago have both Oldowan and Acheulean tools[2]).
I genuinely don’t know what or how you “looked it up”. Please, do enlighten me, I’m not trying to offend. Some sort of a misunderstanding?
This is a sharp rock, not an axe.
You say potato, I say tomato.
A bit dishonest for you to present it as an axe as most people would picture it. It’s a rock with a kinda sharp edge, no where near as advanced as an axe with a handle. I’ve seen animals sharpen rocks, it’s not that impressive. And pretty removed to just assume it was people 800,000 years early.
It’s literally the scientific consensus. You thinking of a cartoon axe with a wedge-shape and an oak handle when you hear the word “axe” isn’t my problem.
I’ve seen animals sharpen rocks, it’s not that impressive. And pretty removed to just assume it was people 800,000 years early.
These hand axes are incredibly complex and it takes hundreds of hours to learn to make one. It is not my fault you’re scientifically ignorant and still silly enough to think your childish notions are better than prevailing scientific notions.
Here’s some proof of earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago. And that doesn’t mean piling sticks together, it means actual woodworking, joinery.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
When you’re in biology class and you see an image of an egg cell, do you start flailing around saying “that’s not an egg, that’s a picture of a slimy circle, eggs are what hens poop out, they’re egg-shaped and made of egg-shell”?
Really not my problem that you don’t believe in science.
It’s not fake. @[email protected] is correct. Stone axes, fire control, language, carpentry, glue, ocean travel - heaps of smart things predate homo sapiens sapiens. We’re not the first smart species.
you know how sometimes you’re trying to solve a puzzle but you’re stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle
it’s that
It’s mostly population density and specialization. You don’t have time to think when you’re doing everything yourself. The biggest advances come when we’re able to fund the best and brightest to basically do nothing but think.
After getting into writing some hard science fiction futurism, I find it much more interesting that we have so very little perspective about where we exist within the present. Our technology is crap, we’re poor as fuck, there is enormous wealth that dwarfs all the wealth on Earth and a whole lot of it is quite accessible if we tried, while we haven’t even scratched the surface of the technology available within biology. Our medicine and healthcare practices are primarily based on anecdotal or correlative nonsense, low sigma test results, and cherry picked terrible science. Many of us here, myself included, are outliers that the present healthcare system fails to help. We have it better than some people in history, but worse than others. It feels like our culture has this mindset like we are the end game; no vision of the future. The only stories told are those of dystopianism. We should change that.
Go solarpunk!
But isn’t that what genres like cyberpunk do? Technological progress (A(G)I, biotech, body modifications, true VR, you name it), but society is even shittier than now? Sure, it is to some degree a cautious tale, but I feel there are quite a lot of near-future hard-ish scifi visions around
What we need is near-future hard-ish sci-fi visions that view the world positively or at least as capable of change. A lot more Star Trek TNG than expanse.
You’re so right about healthcare. The only people who have faith in the healthcare industry have clearly never interacted with it. From the politicized researchers to the patient-facing morons it’s all mostly shit all the way down.
Yes, people forget that a bit over a hundred years ago, there were less than a billion people on the planet.
Yeah well. We kind of had to deal with bears the size of a fucking house for a while. At least until we wiped out their main food source. And rival hominids with at least spears.
And sloths almost as big!
Look out! It’s gradually coming this way!
A friend told me they were surprisingly fast, and you really wanted to stay away from big holes in the ground.
Exponential growth, thats about all there is to it. Advancing from clacking rocks to hunting deer is actually already a huge advancement.
Those 190k years in caves however werent non-advancing. A lot of advancements happened over those years.
Fires, wheels, knot tying, ceramics, pottery, grains, hunting, animal husbandry, medicine, language, art, music, rope…
Also, 10k years is after we gained writing of various forms to store information.
Keep in mind thats at the stage of shit like egypt, the great pyramids, etc. We were waaaaay beyond “cavemen” at that point. We already had trade routes, cities, nations, countless languages, doctors, etc.
The big issue was before that point, all our forms of storing information were just not able to stand the test of time very well, is all. We stopped being “cavemen” way before that mark though.
Woah there. The oldest pyramids we know of are about 5000 years old. That’s halfway to 10k.
Around 10k years before us, we developed from hunter-gatherer cavemen to neolithic city builders with irrigated farms, organized religion and and a feudal society in like 1000 years. That is also pretty quick. Sure, pyramids took a bit longer. But while pyramids are pretty damn impressive, no pyramids does not mean an “uncivilized” society.
Ooga booga no pyramids
Writing isn’t just storing information. It’s transmitting it across much greater distances, more times, with much less corruption.
Oral transmission is better than nothing, but written transmission inherently has better reach. Then the printing press allowing for mass reproduction of transmission, then the internet for rapid, much more democratized transmission. It’s the spread of ideas so they can intermingle that’s the super-accelerator.
The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.
That’s the biggest reason why ~12,000 years ago was when modern humans really started taking off. The entire planet’s climate changed in a way that made agriculture possible, and humans are really damn good at figuring out agriculture when we’re able to
When I think about how long it took me to realize that you’re supposed to pour tetra packs with the spout on top, I find no fault in pre modern man
