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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?

#91

Post by tigerlily »

justahuman74 wrote: post #71
deutschew wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take it from me, at this juncture, New Zealand still doesn’t feel far enough.

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

#92

Post by Alan_Dillman »

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

That ideation was the conceit of philosophy and academia. And possibly specific to Eurasians.

Quoting your link: "who compiled and expanded the work of earlier *natural philosophers* and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as *scientific fact* for two millennia."

Ivory towers and echo chambers come to mind.

People who lived connected to the land and animal husbandry often had different ideas, often ironically closer to the truth. If they knew of the existence of rigor and scientific fact, its explanations weren't really relevant to their days.

To put it to a point: they knew damn well that if they only had a sow pig, they needed to mate it to a boar to get piglets, babies weren't going to appear magically. Through folk knowledge and wisdom, agrarians knew a pig gave birth 114 days after mating, and they would have arranged netflix and chill so that the piglets arrived in spring.

This idea that academics and the upper classes could be wrapped up in silly ideas and old ways can be demonstrated with the story of Edward Jenner, right around the era you were talking about.

>The record shows that it was there that Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox.

But physicians didn't treat peasants, and certainly (up until then) didn't listen to them.

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

#93

Post by Alan_Dillman »

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…

I've long wondered about the generational effects on human physiology and cognition from pregnant women drinking alcohol.

Excessive consumption causes Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but there is no sharp cut off.

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

#94

Post by Alan_Dillman »

Madmallard wrote: post #51
missedthecue wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough to be considered a different species.

I don't think that's relevant here. There is almost a 10 point variation between Japan's average IQ and United States. That's quite a lot. It seems quite plausible older humans could all be significantly below 100 average and have just not figured anything out.

That would fly in the face of nature, where wild animals are almost universally more cognitively resourceful than domesticated versions.

Its special pleading to say humans should be different.

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

#95

Post by ashwagary »

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.

I find how misleading these illustrations are, hilarious. The average European looked subsaharan African (chedderman) 9-10k years ago, but 24k years ago, I'm supposed to believe light skinned Asians with thin straight hair existed.

This is absolutey wrong and is history denial. Black people were in the Americas long before the Olmecs in central America (another ancient African civilization).

All these "Asian" people were highly melanated black people, (Asian historians understand this fact) and they are descendants of mostly fishermen related to Khoikhoi and modern day Xhosa people of south Africa.

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

#96

Post by Alan_Dillman »

jcranmer wrote: post #31
zozbot234 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best. Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be ma…

Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing.

As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home.

Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!"

Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place.

Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.

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

#97

Post by throw0101a »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #70
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 mass…

> Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again.

> What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/buy-the-book/

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

#98

Post by Alan_Dillman »

missedthecue wrote: post #35
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…

So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?

They weren't. Its just an incredibly hard climb.

That primitive technology guy on youtube spent several years trying to climb out of his personal stone age. Even with actual knowledge and a path forward, the most he got was a few iron prills after hours of hard labour.

I could get that much iron out of dirt in a few minutes by running a magnet through it. We've come a long way, and its easy to forget how much our process relies on 6000 years of "ah-ha!" and hard labour.

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

#99

Post by astrange »

missedthecue wrote: post #35
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…

So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?

We spent ~millions of years before that only occasionally changing the shape of our stone tools, and it seems like we had full power brains for much of that time. Sometimes you just don't have the spare calories.

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

#100

Post by astrange »

> This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

One of the more unfortunate names for an environmental magazine since "hakai" means "destruction" in Japanese.

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