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Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#81

Post by nandemo »

ajuc wrote: post #66
jkot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic Ancient Egypt was more liberal than US in 1950. And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? I think it is sexist to assume it could not be a women.

> And do you have any concrete evidence that 'Kushim' is not a female name? Most Indoeuropean languages have a vovel (most often "a") at the end of female names, and a consonant at the end of male names. It's just a consequence of the gender system and postfixes. I'm not sure how old is this distinction, and I don't know if this writing system even preserved the vovels, if yes - it is indeed partial evidence that it…

But Sumerian was not Indo-european. It's considered a language isolate. And even if the name was from a different language that co-existed with Sumerian (like Akkadian), it was likely an Afro-Asiatic one.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#82

Post by madaxe_again »

c3534l wrote: post #51

Traditionally history is said to start where we have written records, the time before the being relegated to anthropology and archeology. But they say that the scope of economic history is larger because we have accounting records before we have written records. Before we had any clay tablets telling legends and recording the events of kings, we have the exchange rate between fish and barley, records of indebtedness,…

businessman

Am I the only one disheartened had by the fact that all of the comments on the article are people angrily calling the author a misogynist and racist?

Does it matter if Kushim was male or female? Is it not enough that they were human, and had a name?

Or do we have to keep at this until one gender or race "wins", whatever that means?

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#83

Post by koolba »

coldtea wrote: post #80
computator wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't we scan and use OCR those clay tablets? Possibly for the same reason you can't scan 88-year-old images of Mickey Mouse without being sued by Disney. The academics who control things like that are protective with their finds (even if they didn't find it, but got control). The Dead Sea Scrolls weren't published for decades because the scholars who got to them first wouldn't let anyone else see them[1]; they…

> Possibly for the same reason you can't scan 88-year-old images of Mickey Mouse without being sued by Disney. You mean besides the scientific (or at least practical, at the current level of OCR/machine learning) impossibility of what the parent suggests? Plus, I don't think parent asks why don't WE scan/ocr/machine learn translate them, but why the archeological community doesn't.

> Plus, I don't think parent asks why don't WE scan/ocr/machine learn translate them, but why the archeological community doesn't.

Pure speculation but if it's like any other scientific community the pressure to be the first to publish would take control. Releasing scans, pictures, etc would allow someone else to beat you to the punch which means they'll get the fame and future funding.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#84

Post by madaxe_again »

guelo wrote: post #55
schoen wrote: post #8

Other brief discussions about this topic suggesting other candidates: http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question114584.html http://ask.metafilter.com/103405/Who-was-the-first-person-in... One Metafilter user ("Riemann") makes the interesting point that a huge number of clay tablets that have been excavated remain untranslated, so it's quite possible that new candidates would turn up over time as scholars examine those a…

Seems like you would first want to translate the oldest tablets. One thing I'm not clear about is how these things are dated, Is radiocarbon dating accurate for clay tablets?

They commonly have bits of organic material in the clay, so yes.

Also, the stratigraphy provides some degree of chronology, although iirc a lot of the tablets come from a single hittite document storage facility which had collapsed on itself, so...

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#85

Post by madaxe_again »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #19

Man, those comments are poison. Amazing how many people flooded in to that article just to act righteously offended and signal how virtuous they are.

people

It's anti-non-personists like you who are ruining the universe. I love how you assume all of those comments are by people, and not by capybara. Can you prove it wasn't capybara? Didn't think so. Huguenot!

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#86

Post by madaxe_again »

azakai wrote: post #39
contingencies wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. Actually, my understanding is that the emerging reality is more interesting. Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on…

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in cont…

Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us.

Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were running the show for much of history, being the ones that can bear young (c.f. Animal hierarchies), and males took control recently, possibly in response to encountering other humans (neanderthalis).

Anyway, it's all very patchy and speculative right now, but further genomic studies and archaeology probably can answer this one.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#87

Post by danieltillett »

madaxe_again wrote: post #86
azakai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in cont…

Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us. Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were runnin…

A Y-chromosome bottleneck actually suggest a limited number of males controlled reproduction not females.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#88

Post by danieltillett »

flukus wrote: post #40
azakai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were non-patriarchal We don't know that, and probably will never know. The problem is that those societies left little that we can use to learn about them. Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in cont…

> Our main source of information of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is often modern hunter-gatherers, but they are very likely to be different than the ancient ones. Two major differences are (1) the modern ones are in contact with modern societies, and (2) the land they live on is not random, it's land agriculturalists didn't decide to occupy, and has some specific characteristics (mainly that it is poor). There are a…

> There are also a whole bunch we've run into that were largely isolated until recently in Australia and the pacific. How many of them are matriarchal?

Zero.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#89

Post by madaxe_again »

danieltillett wrote: post #87
madaxe_again wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the evidence is still here, and it's us. Genomic studies are increasingly suggesting an almighty y-bottleneck 20ka ago. One of the things this is consistent with would be a matriarchical society, as females would control reproduction. Couple this with "Venus" figurines scattered across Europe, evidence for societal upheaval ~15ka ago, and a possible and plausible explanation becomes that females were runnin…

A Y-chromosome bottleneck actually suggest a limited number of males controlled reproduction not females.

Limited number, but not necessarily controlled, and the bottleneck could be symptomatic of a change in control.

You are absolutely right however that it plays both ways - we don't actually yet know enough - but something happened.

Re: Who’s the First Person in History Whose Name We Know? (2015)

#90

Post by FroshKiller »

schoen wrote: post #8

Other brief discussions about this topic suggesting other candidates: http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question114584.html http://ask.metafilter.com/103405/Who-was-the-first-person-in... One Metafilter user ("Riemann") makes the interesting point that a huge number of clay tablets that have been excavated remain untranslated, so it's quite possible that new candidates would turn up over time as scholars examine those a…

The title of Aczel's book is Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers.

The premise was interesting to me, but it's hard for me to recommend to anyone. I couldn't even finish it. It wasn't hard to read or dry, just not well written or edited in my opinion.

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