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

smithsonianmag.com

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

#61

Post by frutiger »

WalterBright wrote: post #24
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?

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.

> There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this! I have to say I’m quite skeptical.

Is there more information you can add? And why would it only affect human babies?

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

#62

Post by InitialLastName »

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.

It's worth noting that nobody lived on a farm before humans started doing agriculture.

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

#64

Post by refurb »

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…

Alaska seems quite developed from the Fairbanks to Anchorage corridor, but you don't have to go far off the highway for it to be complete wilderness. I spent some time there and you'd drive on roads for miles and then they just end - in the sense the road doesn't go any further and everything after that is pretty much wilderness with maybe a few unused logging roads.

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

#65

Post by WalterBright »

InitialLastName wrote: post #62
WalterBright wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's worth noting that nobody lived on a farm before humans started doing agriculture.

I'd be shocked if hunter-gatherers didn't know that animal babies came from the male impregnating the female. They could hardly miss it living in the wild.

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

#66

Post by heavyset_go »

tshaddox wrote: post #47
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

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.

It applied to vermin like mice, too.

From Wired[1]:

> In the 17th century, physician and chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont, apparently sick of there not being enough mice in this world, devised a home recipe for their manufacture. It was quite simple, really, far simpler than getting a girl mouse and boy mouse together with a tiny bottle of wine: “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat,” he wrote, “the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.”

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-how-to-gro...

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

#67

Post by WalterBright »

frutiger wrote: post #61
WalterBright wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers. This is the first time I’ve heard of this! I have to say I’m quite skeptical. Is there more information you can add? And why would it only affect human babies?

I saw it on one of those nature shows by David Attenborough.

Anyhow, the idea is that the father, in order to provide resources to the mother and child, needs reassurance that the child is indeed his. After all, what would you think if your kid looked like the plumber instead of you?

They did some double blind studies, and indeed babies do tend to look more like their fathers.

> why would it only affect human babies?

Because humans are very visual. Other species are more smell oriented. Who knows if their own babies smell like their fathers.

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

#68

Post by WalterBright »

bena wrote: post #48
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…

Progress happens because the intermediate inventions are useful.

Nobody jumps from wooden wheels to steel ball bearings.

But there are some exceptions. The invention of the airplane had intermediate steps, but they were fairly useless on their own. You can see this in the series of prototypes the Wrights made, and then combined them to build a useful airplane.

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

#69

Post by WalterBright »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #44
maxerickson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

It is, simply because you selected which ones to eat.

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

#70

Post by CryptoPunk »

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…

>>If Nuclear WWIII happens, this might be where humans survive.

If WWIII happens, there will be plenty of places people will survive. But in dramatically reduced numbers as, firstly, the people living in major population centers would have been killed en masse, and secondly, as a consequence of the first, global supply chains break down and food and other necessities become extremely scarce.

Technology would see massive regression and an extended dark ages as well, as much of the production base would be destroyed, and the people who predominantly live in large population centers and sustain it would be killed.

I only go into these extremely grim details because I'm seeing too many cavaliar attitudes on social media, and even from some officials and former officials (e.g. former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, saying it's "a question of time" until Russia does something to force a NATO response) about a possible military confrontation between the West and Russia.

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