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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?

#101

Post by ghaff »

deutschew wrote: post #50
ghaff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gl…

The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.

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

#102

Post by Madmallard »

Alan_Dillman wrote: post #94
Madmallard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's wild humans today living in tribes in Amazon jungle and papua new guinea and africa. They're some of the lowest average IQ in the world.

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

#103

Post by antifa »

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…

I always wonder, if in the typical US vs Russia scenario, would Buenos Aries, South Africa, and Australia be able to restablish the 90s before the 2090s?

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

#104

Post by antifa »

danans wrote: post #79
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.

> 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.

I feel like most places have an animal just as bad, if not only because it could be a society without hospitals.

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

#105

Post by bena »

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…

I didn't mention languages specifically because they're really only a small part of programming knowledge.

A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete. Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study. Now it's something you're expected to just know. B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce, etc. were all, at one time, cutting edge computer science. Now they're the basis of it.

Knowledge breeds knowledge. And every piece of knowledge has the potential to open entirely new pathways of knowledge. Apple Pay depends on NFC depends on RFID depends on radio technology, etc.

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

#106

Post by krapp »

astrange wrote: post #100

> 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.

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

I doubt it's unintentional. It's difficult to imagine any modern environmental magazine that wouldn't focus primarily on the ongoing destruction of that environment.

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

#107

Post by treeman79 »

InitialLastName wrote: post #10
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?

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…

I’m going with beer as a trigger for agricultural revolution.

You see occasional stories about a moose getting drunk and stuck in a tree on fermenting apples.

Now some ancient hillbilly figures out that they can get drunk on fermenting fruit. So eventually someone gets the bright idea to try and do it themselves.

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

#108

Post by xscott »

bena wrote: post #105
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…

I didn't mention languages specifically because they're really only a small part of programming knowledge. A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete. Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study. Now it's something you're expected to just know. B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce, etc. were all, at one time, cutting edge computer science. Now they're the basis of…

> A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete.

It sounds like you're dismissing Turing complete languages as basically the same. I think that's kind of like saying all hardware and networking is just made out of electric circuits. It's true, but it's not illuminating.

> Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study

Quicksort was created in 1959 [0], Heapsort in 1964 [1]. Mergesort is from 1945 [2]! They were something undergrads were just "expected to know" shortly after that. There have been incremental improvements since then, but these things haven't been novel in a very long time.

I'm sure you won't change your mind, but this doesn't really support your argument above, "Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then."

> B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce,

Again, 60s and 70s ideas applied on modern hardware. I'll spare you the Wikipedia links for these.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heapsort

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort

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

#109

Post by deutschew »

ghaff wrote: post #101
deutschew wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gl…

The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.

yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.

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

#110

Post by ghaff »

deutschew wrote: post #109
ghaff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.

yes it feels a bit like today, the society increasingly became complex due to ever-changing norms and social morality.

The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.
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