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What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

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Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#21

Post by jcranmer »

InitialLastName wrote: post #10
WalterBright wrote: post #5

What puzzles me about ancient humans is they were as smart as we are, so why did technology advance so slowly?

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors: a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, b…

> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.

The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well.

In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#22

Post by fingerlocks »

WalterBright wrote: post #19
InitialLastName wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strawberries grow from seeds You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.

You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?

Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#23

Post by zhte415 »

WalterBright wrote: post #15
InitialLastName wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors: a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, b…

Both the Americas and Eur-Asia seem to have independently invented agriculture, and it didn't seem to lead to a technological explosion until looong afterwards. Selective breeding was not required for early agriculture. That came later. I'm sure agriculture started with "hey we like strawberries, strawberries grow from seeds, let's plant the seeds and have more strawberries" for each of the plants they gathered.

Writing things down meant not needing to reinvent the wheel.

There's a Mesopotamian joke in there somewhere.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#24

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #19
InitialLastName wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strawberries grow from seeds You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.

You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?

Even animals know where babies come from. Like when the male guards his female(s) and prevents other males from mounting them. There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#25

Post by WalterBright »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #18
WalterBright wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They spent more time surviving. Much of survival work is drudgery, where one can think about other things while working. For example, I do my best work while jogging. > Plus many 'discoveries' were likely accidents. Of course. But those accidents come from playing with things to see what happens, and being curious enough to notice when something unexpected happens. > Like, if you put even modern humans with knowled…

> Agriculture isn't hard to invent Alright, go find a wild grass or vegetable and turn it into something resembling a modern staple crop or vegetable.

It doesn't have to be a modern crop or vegetable.

What do you think the gatherers of a hunter-gatherer tribe were gathering?

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#26

Post by zozbot234 »

jcranmer wrote: post #21
InitialLastName wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors: a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, b…

> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else. The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, b…

Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#27

Post by WalterBright »

fingerlocks wrote: post #22
WalterBright wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?

Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

Anyone who lived on a farm knew better. And selective breeding of plants and animals had gone on for millennia before that.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#28

Post by Madmallard »

WalterBright wrote: post #16
sfblah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know they were as smart as we are?

The American peoples split off from the Asian peoples 25,000 years ago, and are the same intelligence today. That would seem unlikely unless they were the same then as today.

Asians are smarter though

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#29

Post by heavyset_go »

fingerlocks wrote: post #22
WalterBright wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never cast aside a seed and later noticed it sprouting? People who live off the land are surely going to notice such connections. You don't think they knew where human babies came from, and would infer a similarity?

Spontaneous generation was widely believed until the mid-1800s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

There's a line in Antony & Cleopatra about this concerning the origins of some reptiles.

Re: What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

#30

Post by Mikeb85 »

WalterBright wrote: post #25
Mikeb85 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agriculture isn't hard to invent Alright, go find a wild grass or vegetable and turn it into something resembling a modern staple crop or vegetable.

It doesn't have to be a modern crop or vegetable. What do you think the gatherers of a hunter-gatherer tribe were gathering?

Why do you think the agricultural revolution was a big deal?

Prior to that, humans spent way too much time hunting and gathering (prey ran away and wild edibles don't have many calories).

The whole reason technological development accelerated is because people became sedentary.

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