Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 126 posts

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

#41

Post by earleybird »

zhte415 wrote: post #23
WalterBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the transportation vein, kayak construction had a long history of not being written down :-)

That said, there's going to be some upper limit on how much technology can advance orally.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #12
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…

But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.co...

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #27
fingerlocks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#44

Post by s1artibartfast »

maxerickson wrote: post #40
WalterBright wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Planting the seeds of the plants you eat is selective breeding.

Not necessarily, you need to be optimizing for something,intentionally or otherwise.

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

#45

Post by s1artibartfast »

walkhour wrote: post #33
sfblah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An axiom of every discussion you'll ever have is that all populations have exactly the same mean and standard deviation for every single measurable psychological trait that you can think of.

Which is all out wrong if you look at the literature. Nutrition, education, nurturing young, and inbreeding can have profound effects.

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

#46

Post by simonh »

zozbot234 wrote: post #26
jcranmer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 affecte…

It proves there was one, and quite possibly only one ‘city’ or settlement of some kind that was probably intermittently occupied, perhaps on a seasonal basis.

But yes, it is quite possible there are more to find, especially in now flooded former coastlines. I’m not expecting us to find anything spectacularly revolutionary or shocking though. Especially not widely distributed. There doesn’t seem any really good reason they would all be clustered along coastlines all over the place, but not along rivers or by lakes. Gobekli Tepe is nowhere near the coast.

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

#47

Post by tshaddox »

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

Didn’t they believe that only for stuff too small for them to easily see? I’m pretty sure they still knew that chickens came from eggs, for example.

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

#48

Post by bena »

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?

Intelligent, yes. Knowledgeable, no.

Consider programming. Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then. Knowledge builds on knowledge and is logarithmic in growth. When I was born, we had 2400 baud modems. When I was graduating high school, getting a 56k baud modem was hot shit. Now, if I can't stream high definition video in real time on my phone, I think the connection is shitty.

We had to invent agriculture. We had to invent bread. We had to invent construction. The wheel. Pulleys. Ladders. Boats. Vacuum tubes. Transistors. Netflix. Etc. But we can't invent Netflix before we invent transistors.

We can't even think of certain things before certain things are invented. But as more things are invented and recorded, the less leg work we have to do. I don't need to invent bread. Bread is solved six ways from Sunday. We got all sorts of bread. We're so beyond bread, we've invented and solved ways to cook bread after it's been baked. Pre-historic man can't even imagine bread pudding because he doesn't know bread exists.

Progress, at the very least, has a logarithmic component. It could be an arctangent. Where there's a long build up, a rapid rise, then a long tail.

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

#49

Post by deutschew »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #32

I flew to Alaska, and drove down to BC. Before I went I was expecting Alaska to be a desolate place. Alaska is actually pretty developed. Lots of commercial activity, with power lines and trucks going from place to place. I would compare it to Northern Ontario. When I drove down through Yukon, literally drove for hours without seeing any signs of humans other than the road. Very pristine environment from what I remem…

curious where did you go exactly in Yukon? being a hermit, it's been on a list of places I might escape to. Yes, I also believe Yukon and North West Territories is the best place to survive a nuclear war.

The problem with antarctica is that its too cold and lacking in resources. Yukon, NWT, is teeming with stuff you can hunt and eat. I've been reading about Inuits a lot and its fascinating how they have survived.

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

#50

Post by deutschew »

ghaff wrote: post #12
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…

But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.co...

The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves.

Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you?

Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship?

Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point.

These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse.

I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking".

Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.

Post reply on HN