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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?

#71

Post by justahuman74 »

deutschew wrote: post #49
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.

I've often thought that New Zealand is the least bad post-nuclear life. It's simply so far from anything. Even Australia is a big distance away.

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

#72

Post by liketochill »

missedthecue wrote: post #58
dendriti wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question assumes a lot... and that isn't what happened.

I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment. What made them start civilization?

Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.

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

#73

Post by PeterisP »

sfblah wrote: post #14
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?

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

Mutations accumulate at a slow enough rate so that we know that they are very, very similar to modern humans as 24000 years is a very short time for that; and the reasonable proxies for intelligence that can be measured archeologically i.e. brain volume are the same or even in their favor.

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

#74

Post by jsnodlin »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#76

Post by xscott »

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…

> Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then.

I think this is revisionist history at best. Your comments about baud rates and CPUs getting faster is true of course, but look at something like programming languages: I'd put ML from 1973 (later Standard ML, 1983) against Go or Rust, and I'd put something like Icon from 1977 against JavaScript or Python. If anything, I think we've regressed because ML and Icon could actually run on 70s era hardware, but Rust can barely compile its own compiler on 2020s era hardware, and Python wastes CPU and memory as though it was a design goal.

Seriously, look at Standard ML, Icon, or even Scheme and SmallTalk from the 70s, and ask how Python and Go improved on those.

    -----
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_ML

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)

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

#77

Post by earleybird »

WalterBright wrote: post #65
InitialLastName wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sámi to this day manage herds of reindeer. I'd characterize it as farming after a manner. The reindeer for all practical purposes wild, yet they are cared for and benefit the Sámi. I expect they know how little reindeer come to be.

Off in eastern Siberia Tuvans were (until relatively recently) nomadic herders with at least one sub group being reindeer herders.

It seems like a logical step from managing wild herds to domesticating wild animals and I'm curious as to why domestication happens in some places and not in others. Then again, if it's working, why mess with it. :-)

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

#78

Post by earleybird »

postalrat wrote: post #63
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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island Go ask them.

They don't seem that approachable. :-)

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

#79

Post by danans »

deutschew wrote: post #49
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.

> Yukon, NWT, is teeming with stuff you can hunt and eat.

And likely teeming with stuff that can hunt and eat you. Well, just grizzlies I guess.

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

#80

Post by danans »

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…

> Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization)

I don't think it's settled that these are independent. Especially Mesopotamia and Indus Valley, and Meso and South America.

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