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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?

#81

Post by kristianp »

xscott wrote: post #76
bena wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyt…

Wow, I didn't realise ML was developed so early. Is there a history of the early work in the 70s? What machines did it run on?

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

#82

Post by danans »

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, 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.

Or as someone here once said, in the real world all hockey stick growth is eventually sigmoid.

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

#83

Post by WalterBright »

heavyset_go wrote: post #66
tshaddox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grai…

Just because somebody wrote something doesn't mean that people in general believed it.

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

#84

Post by dukeofdoom »

refurb wrote: post #64
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.

We stuck to pretty much the main roads, but I went to Denali as well, so I've experienced how vast and beautiful it is.

I was just curious and looked up the population density. Alaska has a population density of 1.3 people per square mile and Yukon just 0.07 per square km. If I did the math right Yukon has a population density of 0.027 people per square mile. Or Alaska is about 5 times more densely populated.

Of the 34 thousand people that live in all of Yukon, 25 thousand live in Whitehorse. That leaves just 9k people for everywhere else.

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

#85

Post by xscott »

kristianp wrote: post #81
xscott wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anyt…

Wow, I didn't realise ML was developed so early. Is there a history of the early work in the 70s? What machines did it run on?

Other than the standard search engines or Wikipedia, I don't know where to find a good history of language or hardware. I'm only aware of these examples because they were part of my "comparative programming languages" course in the early 90s.

I suspect this thread will fade without much more notice, but I'm half expecting someone to come along and set me straight that all this stuff was really invented in the 50s or 60s :-) (SNOBOL, Algol, Simula, or PL/I ???)

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

#86

Post by WalterBright »

liketochill wrote: post #72
missedthecue wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies.

Nobody likes to talk about it, though.

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

#87

Post by dotancohen »

liketochill wrote: post #72
missedthecue wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor.

Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...

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

#88

Post by Steko »

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?

1. Technically they weren’t as smart. Fetal and child nutrition is hugely important for brain development. Modern language is far more complex. Intellectual stimulation for children is far mote advanced.

2. Slow by who’s definition? It seems like they were doing lots of useful things in a pretty harsh environment. Cleverness for cavemen was measured in surviving and outcompeting other smart humans, hominids and predators. Language and culture got more and more complex and yeah they developed a long list of physical technology.

3. Intelligence isn’t sufficient to produce a lot of technology. For example, domesticating wild grains may require you to be sedentary which itself has other requirements and is something you don’t get when your survival depends on following herds of megafauna around. More than the tech tree often you need some sort of pressure like running out of new places to live and/or running out of the megafauna you’ve always chased.

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

#89

Post by refurb »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #84
refurb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We stuck to pretty much the main roads, but I went to Denali as well, so I've experienced how vast and beautiful it is. I was just curious and looked up the population density. Alaska has a population density of 1.3 people per square mile and Yukon just 0.07 per square km. If I did the math right Yukon has a population density of 0.027 people per square mile. Or Alaska is about 5 times more densely populated. Of the…

Population density isn't a great measure for how undeveloped an area is since population isn't uniformly distributed.

Like the Yukon, Alaska has most of its population in the cities and for Alaska it's along the coast in small towns. The interior is mostly wilderness.

But regardless, no doubt Yukon is as empty as you describe.

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

#90

Post by akvadrako »

dotancohen wrote: post #87
liketochill wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor. Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion…

Not just that, but beer can make you braver and more willing to challenge the status quo.
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