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

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

#91

Post by danieltillett » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 11:58 AM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #89

danieltillett wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have evidence from other mammals and all other cases a strong Y-chromosome bottleneck is the result of harem male behaviour. If I had to bet I would say the bottleneck was driven by powerful males monopolising females, not females all choosing a small number of males.

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

#92

Post by amelius » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:07 PM UTC

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,…

> Traditionally history is said to start where we have written records

Well, written records always describe something which happened before they were written. So technically, I'm not sure what to make of it.

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

#93

Post by NoGravitas » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

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.

Yet here you are, signaling your virtue to a different community. This is a thing that humans do. There's no need to get bent out of shape about it.

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

#94

Post by bhaak » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:43 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #50

I know that Sumerian numbers were written in a combination of bases 6 and 10 (symbols represented, e.g., 360, 600, etc), but how do they get 29,086 out of those symbols?

Looking at the example image on Wikipedia's page, I still have a hard time recognizing the numbers, even though they are marked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Examples

People have always been using short hand and sloppy hand writing, I don't find it surprising that you can't recognize the numbers without some practise.

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

#95

Post by adekok » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:49 PM UTC

erdevs wrote: post #14

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male nam…

> That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic.

I have serious ethical concerns with such a claim. It gives a simplistic view of history, to the point of severe distortion.

It implies that all women terribly oppressed, while all men had lives of unrelenting leisure. That's simply not true.

What is true is that the Mesopotamian civilizations were violent, hierarchical, racist, genocidal, poor, etc. Many men were slaves, killed in wars, or beaten to death by the rich. Calling a society that treated women poorly "misogynistic" is like calling the USA a "technological" society. Well, it mostly is, but you could also call it an oligarchy, capitalistic, and sometimes democratic. No one sweeping term is accurate.

The Biblical story of Esther shows that women were valued, and had significant "behind the scenes" power.

I would even venture to say that there are no human societies, ever, where women were utterly powerless. Such a society would quickly collapse.

> ... but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.

As opposed to our society, where most politicians and business leaders are male?

As for why this happens, see:

http://www.comparativecandidates.org/sites/default/files/Eng...

Once we take into account incumbent advantage – where more men are incumbent - the ratio of elected women is about the ratio of the female candidates. When we model candidate success measured as the number of preference votes for individual candidates we do not find that women receive fewer votes than men on party ballots either.

Maybe men just prioritize competitiveness more than women do. And for some strange reason, people who are competitive out-compete people who aren't competitive.

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

#96

Post by coldpie » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

gilleain wrote: post #79

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…

This is all very true, however even if they _did_ want to scan them, it's not just like scanning a bunch of papers. I sat next to a guy working on the Genizah project ( https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah ) and saw a tiny bit of the difficulties in doing something similar. - Presumably these clay tablets have to be handled carefully when scanned - These scans would ideally be high-resolution, requiring spe…

Tangentially related, but people who are interested in digitally archiving ancient materials might enjoy reading this article from one of my favorite blogs: https://medievalbooks.nl/2015/12/18/x-rays-expose-a-hidden-m...

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

#97

Post by mattlondon » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

flukus wrote: post #56

tacon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, how about machine vision plus Mechanical Turk or reCAPTCHA, with the human helping with difficult symbols? Apparently we already have a training set of the translated tablets.

I read about a group doing this recently actually. The specifically avoided teach people the language so that they could just translate what the saw and not read in context that wasn't there.

Just transcribing the tablets into some sort of digital format would probably be a good step (and be a useful corpus for archival purposes if/when they accidentally/deliberately get lost or destroyed, e.g. syria)

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

#98

Post by adekok » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:58 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #15

erdevs wrote: post #14

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed. That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record. So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male nam…

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 and patriarchal societies ...

i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small.

Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions.

There is no intrinsic "male" preference here. No "patriarchal" society promotes men simply for being men. Simple math shows this to be true.

The leaders of a "patriarchal" society are perhaps 10%? Maybe 1% of the population. Yet 50% of the population is male. i.e. At least 80% of the male population had limited status, and limited power.

We only call these societies "patriarchal" because we concentrate on the leaders. Everyone wants to be rich and powerful. No one wants to be a 16 year-old boy who's conscripted into an army, and then forced to die of starvation or illness in a foreign land, due to the whim of a king.

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

#99

Post by minikites » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

martinko wrote: post #73

"Note from Robert Krulwich: I see that this column has offended a whole bunch of you. Yes, as many of you point out, my viewpoint was white, male (and hung up on fame and power) and many of you have serious, and totally legitimate arguments with my assumptions. Now that I read your comments, I’m a little surprised, and a touch ashamed of myself. But the thing is—those were my assumptions. They were wrong. I say so."…

Why is it bullshit to consider the feelings and dignity of people who are different from you?

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

#100

Post by pluma » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

adekok wrote: post #98

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 and patriarchal societies ... i.e. unorganized societies are largely egalitarian, and small. Organized societies are not egalitarian, but are larger than unorganized ones. Organized societies tend to treat the leaders better than the masses (go figure). And the leaders are the ones who win the leadership competitions. There is no intrinsic "male" prefe…

The problem you are addressing is part of an ideology called "intersectional feminism": the idea that all interactions between two individuals are also interactions between whatever buckets the two individuals fall into -- men and women, whites and blacks, heteros and homos, cis and trans, and so on.

By that reasoning a man in Western culture is inherently privileged over a woman simply because men in general are typically privileged over women in general. This leads to redefining sexism as "sexism from a position of power" (because arguably sexism without power is "harmless") and "power" is then often treated as a synonym for "privilege".

And this is how you end up with Hillary Clinton (a woman with significant wealth and political power) being less privileged than a male salaried worker simply by association.

Note that this idea isn't inherently discriminatory against men (or whites or whatever) either -- if the balances were different it'd be equally unfair.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYpELqKZ02Q