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Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

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Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#51

Post by AlecSchueler »

dheera wrote: post #18

I wonder how society would behave if those homonids were still around today. A lot of society norms are based on our intelligence levels being remarkably approximately equal across all of our species. What if there existed a bunch of beings on Earth that were somewhere in-between a human and a monkey in intelligence, cognitive, and language abilities? Would they go to school and be a part of the economy and job marke…

Not quite the same but we do actually have populations of people with significantly reduced capacities, such as those with Down's Syndrome. I'm not sure how it is everywhere but in Western Europe there's generally quite a bit of effort put in by families, carers, charities and businesses to give them a sense of life in society.

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#52

Post by TechBro8615 »

wsgeorge wrote: post #44
TechBro8615 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the argument that it's definitionally impossible to enslave someone without dehumanizing them, if you believe that certain inalienable freedoms are part of being human, and thus you cannot take them away from someone without dehumanizing them. But if by "dehumanization" you really mean "racist," then yes indeed, slavery was originally based more on generic power imbalances (prisoners of war, or offspring of…

> I'm not sure that race was even an attribute that the ancients felt worthy of mentioning > Wikipedia [0] seems to agree ("skin tones did not carry any social implications") When I read this comment (before your edit), I was a bit surprised, since ethnicity and "blood/familial" relations were absolutely huge in ancient Rome. I generally use a definition of race that's much broader than skin tone, and I see it as int…

Oh they definitely had enslavement from birth. But generally the original reason for enslaving the parents/grandparents was because they were a prisoner of war, or ended up on the wrong end of some power imbalance - it's unlikely they were enslaved for any reason directly related to their physical attributes like skin tone.

(I guess you could argue that an empire that invaded another culture/nation/territory and then enslaved its people was effectively enslaving them based on something akin to "race," but that argument is slightly weakened by the fact that the Roman army didn't only conquer "barbarians" but also went to war against their contemporary civilizational peers, often driven by familial disputes between emperors.)

So while enslaving someone from birth is undoubtedly bad, I'm not sure it's fair to characterize it as enslavement based on racial attributes, if the slave's ancestor was originally enslaved for reasons unrelated to race. Like, I guess you could call it racism if you squint, but only in the sense that skin color (or whatever other physical attributes you might associate with race) is an inherited characteristic, which seems like self-referential reasoning.

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#53

Post by stOneskull »

ethanbond wrote: post #37
polishdude20 wrote: post #9

Can they just be doodles? Sometimes I just draw crosshatch lines and stuff especially when I was in college.

Potentially but like… that’s very very hard rock, so those would be some very effortful doodles. Maybe they had more boring classes than we do today though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

maybe they're tripping

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#55

Post by wsgeorge »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #52
wsgeorge wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure that race was even an attribute that the ancients felt worthy of mentioning > Wikipedia [0] seems to agree ("skin tones did not carry any social implications") When I read this comment (before your edit), I was a bit surprised, since ethnicity and "blood/familial" relations were absolutely huge in ancient Rome. I generally use a definition of race that's much broader than skin tone, and I see it as int…

Oh they definitely had enslavement from birth. But generally the original reason for enslaving the parents/grandparents was because they were a prisoner of war, or ended up on the wrong end of some power imbalance - it's unlikely they were enslaved for any reason directly related to their physical attributes like skin tone. (I guess you could argue that an empire that invaded another culture/nation/territory and then…

Ah yeah, thinking about it a little more carefully, I see your point, especially on the topic of slavery.

Although the ancient Romans were absolutely big on ethnic/racial discrimination, the specific institution of slavery was not based on this. And their strong sense of the rule of law allowed for more civic forms of discrimination. For example, Germanic peoples weren't enslaved because they were non-Italian. They were just denied citizenship and its privileges, etc.

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#56

Post by shrubble »

greatpostman wrote: post #10

The big secret: “Homo sapiens” are hybrid combinations of different species that have long disappeared. “Non human hominids” are frequently groups that mixed with Homo sapiens. Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions

Are you referring to those with Denisovan vs those with Neanderthal vs those with neither?

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#57

Post by AbrahamParangi »

If we look at the origins of major groups of animals, the first dinosaurs or at earliest stages of bird evolution, we see often see multiple related groups evolving convergently due to similar pressures. My favorite example of this is that powered flight may have been acquired three or more times in closely related but distinct groups of theropod dinosaurs.

When we think of the other branches of the Human family tree, we often think of them as sort of diverging from our ancestors and then freezing unchanged. However, it would not at all be surprising if the pressures which so aggressively favored increased intelligence in our ancestors also applied to all our "cousins".

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#58

Post by booleandilemma »

dheera wrote: post #18

I wonder how society would behave if those homonids were still around today. A lot of society norms are based on our intelligence levels being remarkably approximately equal across all of our species. What if there existed a bunch of beings on Earth that were somewhere in-between a human and a monkey in intelligence, cognitive, and language abilities? Would they go to school and be a part of the economy and job marke…

If I know anything about humans, we'd probably try to have sex with them.

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#59

Post by jl6 »

akiselev wrote: post #16

The news is that homo naledi did these things at the same time as humans despite a much smaller brain size, contradicting the social brain hypothesis somewhat. Their cranial capacity was 465-610 cubic cm compared to about 1,300 for humans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi Edit: this was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345824 and dang moved it (??)

They’re not terribly sophisticated markings, or obviously social. Even if brain size correlates exactly with capability, doing these at ~40% brain size seems quite plausible.

Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

#60

Post by greatpostman »

shrubble wrote: post #56
greatpostman wrote: post #10

The big secret: “Homo sapiens” are hybrid combinations of different species that have long disappeared. “Non human hominids” are frequently groups that mixed with Homo sapiens. Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions

Are you referring to those with Denisovan vs those with Neanderthal vs those with neither?

There’s other unidentified populations. They just can’t find bones to isolate the dna
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