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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

The way I remember history taught in school is essentially "pre-history (first human settlements)" => giant leap to => "ancient high culture starting 3000 BCE", with a supplementary piece of info going like "well we don't really know yet what happened between those two". Back then it was clear to me, and so almost certainly to the researcher/historians of the time, that you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice.

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In every civilisation there’s founding myths, Romulus and Remus from Rome, Yellow Emperor from China, Abraham from Israel, the Dreaming for indigenous Australians. I wonder how much those myths might actually be telling us about those otherwise undocumented times.

It makes me wonder what founding myths we live with today. I wont even bother to speculate at the risk of promoting flamebait but I imagine our myths are some of our most scared truths. Of course that's not to say they're conspiracies but just very convenient lies.

Lies, or corruption due to verbal communication inter generations.

There are mythical accounts verbally communicated for geological events like mega eruptiona spanning tens of thousand years.

They’re not necessarily lies. I usually assume myths are faithful transcriptions of actual historical events, just stylized in order to aid in their retelling.

I think the Big Bang “theory” is one. It might be accurate, or maybe our universe is squirting out of a worm hole. Either way we believe our stories of the beginning to be true just as vigorously and reason about them just as much as the ancients did.

>you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice

See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.

The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?

"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.

Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.

As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that the complexity of languages has changed over the last 200,000 years. The languages spoken by today's stone-age hunter-gatherers (there still are a few) are not systematically and fundamentally different from the languages spoken by more technologically advanced groups.

Well, I think we have next to no information about language development for 195,000 of those 200,000 years, so we don't a much reason to believe anything.

I'd speculate that since language skills are important, evolution would have worked to increase them over that era.

I don't know much about human evolution and history... However, if language skills evolved after humans left Africa then I'd expect them to have evolved a bit differently in different local populations. Yet innate language skills seem to be the same everywhere. So I would guess that innate language skills haven't changed much in the last 100,000 years. So I would guess that people have been speaking languages like today's languages (in all their glorious variety) for the last 100,000 years.

> The languages spoken by today's ... are not systematically and fundamentally different ...

That is a meaningless statement, when there is no consensus on the fundamentals of language, and more so because the Languages of the world differ variously.

I'm not sure what you think how complexity of language is measured. Certainly, there are terms and expressions that had to be invented along with the concepts that they describe, which hunter gatherers don't know, and that's not limited to technology. Emotional content would be much more important on a human scale. I think the question would have to be, whether everyone was able to speak. Which term would the analogous to "literate"?

I think we basically agree.

The only way I can think of for measuring the complexity of a language is an inaccurate empirical one: see how hard it is for speakers of unrelated languages to learn it. That approach would probably confirm that Hausa is harder to learn than Bahasa Indonesia, for example, though whether that's what other people mean by "complexity", I can't say.

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