There's some crazy statistic that 80% of Americans live within 50 or 100 miles where they were born.
Look at it this way... using only stuff they found on the ground, they were able to successfully and repeatably hunt animals that weighed 5-8 tons, were faster than humans, had multiple natural weapons that could easily kill a human, and were both herd-oriented and highly intelligent by herbivore standards. Do you think you could do that? That doesn't sound primitive to me. That sounds really sophisticated.
I'm not convinced they were starving "cavemen". If they couldn't cut it, Mother Nature would just kill them off - unlike modern, "civilized" people. They had better use of their brains than we do in day-to-day survival.
One thing to consider is population growth was fairly slow overall. Just 5% every 100 years and 2 people grow to ~6.8 billion in 45,000 years and there where far more than 2 people back then.
This surprising reappraisal of American and European physiques is the work of researcher John Komlos of Munich University. 'Much of the difference is due to the great social inequality that now exists in the United States,' Komlos told The Observer last week. 'In Europe, there is - in most countries - good health service provision for most members of society and plenty of protein in most people's diets. As a result, children do not suffer illnesses that would blight their growth or suffer problems of malnutrition. For that reason, we have continued to grow and grow.'
http://econpapers.repec.org/RAS/pko37.htm The height of US-born non-Hispanic children and adolescents ages 2-19, born 1942-2002 in the NHANES Samples
PS: I have wondered if part of the disdain historic rulers had for the lower classes was not just education, but also poor nutrition lowering IQ's. Diet can easily make a 30 point difference in IQ which is huge.
Am I in the middle of a fuck wad nerd debate? I time travel 45,000 years into the past. Will I be able to survive? If not that proves humans were just as smart then as they are now. Where's that pg "Life is Short" article?
Primitive modifies the word world.
I knew a guy once who did his PhD work on chipping flint, reproducing the techniques used by various Stone Age people. He loved chipping flint and making tools. They were sharp, and dangerous, and fragile, and took hours or days to make (not counting the failures). He spent years studying and refining his technique.
Making a high-quality spear, good enough to kill mammoths effectively? That takes years to perfect. It's an intellectual challenge on par with writing software, based on tradition and teaching akin to our school system. It's not easy or trivial! It's not primitive, at least not in the demeaning way it's being expressed here.
Those "primitives" were every bit as smart as you, every bit as hardworking, and their techniques on par with ours in terms of rigor and effort. What they didn't have was tens of thousands of years of additional development, so they had to know everything about survival. They didn't get their mammoth wrapped in plastic.
How's your immune system? Allergies? Asthma? Eyesight?
What we have is surviving evidence from a few people thought the world flat. But that evidence does not necessarily reflect popular belief.
Also for people inland, they may not even have had a reason to entertain the idea at all. That is most people may not have even considered the question.
Obviously lots of early seafaring peoples held no such beliefs. Greeks, Phoenicians, Vikings, middle eastern traders, chinese traders, etc...
Among the illiterate masses, flat earth might have been a thing.
Dante's Divine Comedy, finished in 1320, for example, goes into a lot of detail about the difference between the hemispheres such as how it affects which stars are visible and the concept of time difference and where he imagines the sun rises and sets over different parts of the world, and how gravity changes as Dante travels through the earth to arrive at other side.
It's first four known printed editions incidentally all pre-date Columbus first voyage, being published in 1472, 1477, 1482 and 1491 in Foligno, Venice and Florence, and adding up to hundreds of copies.
We also know that Columbus had read Claudius Ptomely's work, as well as Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi which depicts the world as a globe. For some books we know this specifically because he owned printed editions and scribbled extensively in the margins.
These books were circulated in some numbers: Columbus did not have to dig up obscure hand written copies or somehow otherwise come across old, forgotten knowledge that nobody else had. He grow up at a time when Italian publishers were churning out rapidly increasing numbers of copies of classical texts all over the place, and works by authors like Ptolemy and d'Ailly (and Dante) who explicitly described the world as round were printed in multiple editions and sought after.
We also known that Ptolemy's work had been sought after in Europe for hundreds of years before that, with adaptations of his Geography, which reflects a round earth, regularly being made and amended and updated with additional information. The first printed edition of his Geography to include engraved maps was made in Bologna in 1477.
http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/article/am...
You would have thought countries would have claimed the New World a lot earlier.
The myth that people thought the earth was flat has been attributed to Washington Irving (late 18th/early 19th century author & historian).
Columbus actually thought the earth was pear-shaped and 1/3 of the size that everyone since the Ancient Greeks knew it to be.
The issue was not "we'll fall off the edge of the earth." The issue was "Holy cow, you're going to try and sail 13,000 nautical miles?"
what is crazy about it? or wrong?
Family/social ties are a hell of a thing.