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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?

#111

Post by sfblah »

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…

Can you say more about Rust being barely able to compile its own compiler? Do you have a reference for that? (I've never used Rust)

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

#112

Post by WalterBright »

treeman79 wrote: post #107
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…

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.

> someone gets the bright idea

All my ideas are Bright ideas (tm).

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

#113

Post by JudgePenitent »

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?

Because there were so few people. The inverse of your question is why did technology seemingly explode beginning around 10k years ago? And the answer to that is simple: the Milankovitch cycles had brought about a warming trend, bringing an abundance of resources.

It is interesting to notice that sedentism and agriculture happened at the same time. The modern theory is that agriculture practice led to sedentism, but at the very least its unclear which came first because the earliest confirmed harvested (ie non wild growing) varieties of grains from the middle east come from approximately the same period as the beginning of this warming.

However, once not only agriculturalism but pastoralism (and even beyond that nomadic pastoralism, and the domestication of the horse) had proven their usefulness to maintaining scaling sedent populations, the populations exploded and naturally, bored human beings with brains and full bellies sit around and think of different ways to do things.

tl;dr: they were unlucky wrt technological innovation

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

#114

Post by reggedtorespond »

Madmallard wrote: post #102
Alan_Dillman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they would laugh at you and think you're a dullard for not being able to navigate in the jungle and identify every plant you come across.

IQ tests have ingrained cultural factors just like the standards of intelligence those tribes have.

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

#115

Post by astrange »

krapp wrote: post #106
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.

Well false friends are pretty common, it seems like it comes from an indigenous place name in BC.

Hawaiian and Japanese have a lot of false friends too, since it’s borrowed words and the languages already look alike.

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

#116

Post by heavyset_go »

WalterBright wrote: post #83
heavyset_go wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read the whole article, these notions were widespread for millennia, it wasn't just van Helmont who thought that.

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

#117

Post by wtinasky »

reggedtorespond wrote: post #114
Madmallard wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they would laugh at you and think you're a dullard for not being able to navigate in the jungle and identify every plant you come across. IQ tests have ingrained cultural factors just like the standards of intelligence those tribes have.

No post body was provided.

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

#118

Post by bena »

xscott wrote: post #108
bena wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 196…

It does support my argument. Unless you want to quibble about exact times and how 1959 isn't "the 70s".

Before 1959, Quicksort was novel. After that, it was something you were expected to know.

Knowledge builds on knowledge. I don't have to invent heapsort. I can just study the implementation. It's now part of the common knowledge we're supposed to have.

And if you think programming is just as sophisticated today as it was in the 70s and 80s, then I don't think there's anything anyone can say to you to convince you otherwise.

And that's kind of the defining feature of being Turing-complete. No language is more or less adept at solving problems as any other as long as they can replicate a Turing machine.

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

#120

Post by wtinasky »

PeterisP wrote: post #73
sfblah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.
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