What Came First: The Village or the Temple? Or, the Mystery of Göbekli Tepe
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Apart from how far back those things span, this also illustrates how enormously the rate of change in culture and living conditions has accellerated in our time.
Think about it: If you could time-travel back to somewhere within those 40,000 years, you might encounter a group of hunter-gatherers.
Their remote ancestors, as far back for them as ancient egypt is for us, were: hunter-gatherers.
Their descendants in the distant future, as far away from them as Star Treck is for us, will be: hunter-gatherers.
Compare this with our time life style and technology is radically different than it was 200 years ago and at least technological innovation seems to be accellerating even more.
Exponential growth of technology. It's only in the past couple centuries that inventions started to add up and lead to further inventions within a single lifetime. Before that, the lives of people separated by 200 years were roughly identical, with maybe a single thing improving here or there.
(My current belief is that most of those figures I mentioned, and other famous scientists, weren't that much smarter than average - they were just the first to familiarize themselves with existing knowledge and make the next small step. This explains why so many discoveries were made simultaneously, within months or years, by different people who weren't in contact - it's because when a critical mass of knowledge is accumulated, the next step is obvious for a sufficiently educated/equipped person.)
As for whether we could have had all the inventions add up a little bit quicker - maybe. Politics and economies in the past could look different. If Rome didn't fall, maybe we'd already be colonizing the moons of Saturn. Or maybe we'd only be witnessing the first "horseless carriage" now.
I think this is best exemplified by one particular episode of the YouTube "Primitive Technology" series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVV4xeWBIxE . In this video, the creator builds a forge blower from sticks, leaves, stones, and vines. All materials that would've been available to primitive man 40,000 years (or more) ago...
...but the forge blower wasn't known to human kind until the 1600s! In other words, the creator of the "Primitive Technology" videos was able to build a forge blower because he knew about the concept (and, presumably, the principles of pressure and centrifugal force that make it all work). Those had to be discovered through thousands of years of an arduous process of trial, error, analysis, and teaching.
So, the Einstein of 40,000 years ago likely existed, but he may have only been able to discover and convince others to, say, pre-burn wood to generate charcoal. In terms of an advancement over existing technology, I'd argue such an advance would be even more significant than General Relativity, and yet it's technology that we can run down to the corner store and procure for $5 a bag today.
Crude steam engines were already constructed in the ancient world. From what we know, those people couldn't figure much need for them, beyond spicing up your temple experience with magically moving statues. They lacked both the necessary knowledge to make good use of their invention, as well as an immediate practical use for it.
See Steve Theodore’s answer on Quora for more: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-industrial-revolution-oc...
There are tons of reasons. Really the past 250 years have been the extreme exception to the more "normal" state - it might be more appropriate to ask what we did in this time that changed things so much
And it takes a long time for writing to catch on — classic network effects. If only a few people can read, it’s not that useful and nobody bothers writing stuff down other than personal notes or business records.
Or, to take a middle ground between those two stances, maybe, well, it was just an equilibrium (sans value judgment about whether it was a 'good' one or a 'bad' one). What's wrong with a system at equilibrium?
Depends on how are you satisfied with the state of things. For me, things will be wrong until we get rid of suffering, illness and death.
Still, I don't believe there ever was a real stagnation, or equilibrium. Things were always changing, just for most of the recorded history, those changes were very, very slow - unnoticeable to individuals living then. The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat.
For me this doesn't make sense. I'm all for alleviating suffering, illness and death but can't see how total freedom from those things would be possible, or even desirable. I am aware that something called 'trans-humanism' exists, I'd just be interested to hear if anyone could argue for such a stance with reasonable integrity.
Can you fill that blank? I can't.
Edit: also read this https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
So no, I don't think this argument for species holds either.
Well yes, there's heat death of the universe that we still have to contend with :P. But beyond that, what you wrote is not a problem. The biology itself works around it - it "repairs" by copying and checksumming, and does so using energy. It's not perfect (this is what enables evolution), but it's perfectable. We already know enough to realize that we can design systems which allow for reducing the probability of incorrectable errors to arbitrarily low amounts - that's practically infinite repairability. No one is saying maintenance is ever going to become free.
Magic does not exist, even in the future.
Death is an adaptation. http://www.necsi.edu/research/evoeco/programmed.pdf
Once evolution created the human species, a species that is smart and can debate ethics, there is no need to depend on evolution to improve either the species or the individual. Technology and our ethics can allows us and guide us to improve. Whether we like it or not, transhumanism is going to come in the next few centuries and then we will be able to systematically improve our bodies and brains as we chose to improve them, not by the random statistical process of evolution by natural selection.
Ironically, I believe we're on a good way to develop the technologies that were needed for that - just, with how things are developing right now, I'm pessimistic that we have the sociological skills to to put them to any kind of positive use.
If we're already fighting increasingly agressive political battles about where we should steer the part of the world we are able to control, how would that look in a virtual reality wher we had control over absolutely everything?
If you're annoyed today that your programs, books, movies, games, phones and cars are tethered to their vendors over the internet, can be used to spy on you and can be updated with changed functionality on a whim - imagine if your own body or mind suddenly required a cloud backend owned by someone else.
I think before we get the technological transhumanist utopia, we have to realise a society that would be able to deal with it. Otherwise, it would be a rather grim irony if we defeated death only to replace it with biblical eternal damnation.
Not just almost, the tangent at t=0 is flat.
Also, you need vast amounts of land to maintain that lifestyle. You can argue that there are too many humans, and I'd agree with you. But to have less humans we either need to have less babies, or live a lifestyle that involves lots of infant mortality.
Modern civilisation tends to have less babies - there's a strong inverse correlation between country development and family size.
Hunter-gatherers solved it the other way.
I get the argument for living in touch with nature, etc. It's all very romantic. But arguing that watching most of your babies die is "better" than this... no, sorry, that doesn't work for me.
Also, child mortality (and general mortality) was probably much lower - a lot of diseases, and especially pandemics, are tied directly to agriculture making people live with animals, and urbanization making a lot of people live together with a lot of animals on a small piece of land.
We know that present-day hunter-gatherer peoples have high infant mortality.
We know that hunter-gatherers need a lot of land per person, and so therefore need to control their population, without birth control.
Yes, agriculture and high population density brings different problems and diseases, but to argue that somehow those are worse is to ignore basic statistics.
I do get the mental health argument, but only if you accept a bunch of stuff about human mental health that isn't fun. For exactly the same reasons that veterans don't get PSTD or depression until they stop fighting, we're going through a process of de-traumatising developed populations. We don't really know what lies the other side, because we've never been in a prolonged multi-generational period of peace and plenty.
If it takes thousands of years of worse conditions to get to a better lifestyle, is that progress?
There were, however, more people living in medieval Europe than there were when Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers. So yes, I'd count that as progress. As for lifestyle, it's hard to say... the life of a medieval peasant in Europe wasn't that bad. They had a lot of security, a community around them to support them, rights that were guaranteed by that community. They worked hard, but at work that was meaningful to the community. Things might have been worse in the cities, but the vast majority of people in medieval Europe lived in rural farming villages. I wouldn't necessarily say that they had it worse than a hunter-gatherer. Or even than a modern tech worker...
See for example the Nagualism tradition which was equally as developed as Vedic philosophy. But its teachers were all slaughtered and its books burned by the Catholic Church. By the 20th century “nagual” has become a slur.
Now we look back and say memo-Americans were primitive and did nothing for tens of thousands of years:
No, they were far more advanced than Europeans, but their knowledge was dangerous to the colonial mission and therefore expunged from history.
I always wonder about how far this goes... Humans from 100,000 years ago were basically like us. Our oldest history goes back maybe 15,000 of those years. Australian Aboriginal history, the longest I'm aware of, goes back less than half of that.
We know that humans travelled over the Pacific, traded between South America And North Africa, for example. But because we don't have any artifacts from those periods we assume that this was haphazard and random rather than deliberate and organised. But artifacts just don't survive this long. So we have no idea what kind of societies were around 75,000 years ago.
They could have discovered iron and made iron tools or weapons. But iron tools will completely disintegrate in 75,000 year, while stone ones won't. So we only see the stone tools, and assume they only had stone tools.
It's interesting to speculate, but as there's no evidence (nor can there be) it'll remain an interesting speculation until we invest time travel.
The poster child for this is the druids in the UK. The Romans went on a deliberate campaign to destroy the druids. They documented it in their written histories, culminating in the invasion of the holy island of Anglesea. They stamped the whole religion out thoroughly. They had ~400 years to do that. Then there was ~1000 years of Christianity, not at all tolerant of other faiths. Then there was the Victorians, who were really, really keen on the occult and ancient knowledge. And suddenly an ancient oral tradition of druidism pops up. Convenient.
I know there are oral histories that are sacred to Australian indigenous peoples, and I don't doubt for a second that they are true, but I'm always wary of trusting them.
Along with the serious climate swings, our culture changed. How much is straight-up the result of less ice is debatable, (I don't want to sound like Jared Diamond), but the fact remains: glaciers went, we developed agriculture. And we've been on the treadmill ever since.
Because it tooks us a long time to understand and harness energy. To go from primarily human energy only to external energy. For example, the ability to turn a barrel of oil into work changed the game. People say the industrial revolution was the game changer. It wasn't. It was oil.
Human civilization and progress seems to be directly related to energy use. What separated the US from britain and europe was our endless supply of oil. It isn't an accident that the wealthiest man and the most valuable company of the 19th century was Rockefeller of Standard Oil.
Oil unleashed an enormous amount of energy that facilitated pretty much all of modern civilization - including the stupendous rise in population.
Oil gave us a lot of qualitative improvements, but the game-changer was still the steam engine. A way of turning external energy into work, be it wood, coal or oil. With that figured out, we've quickly moved through increasingly energy-dense fuels.
And if you haven't invented writing yet, more likely than not anything you invent will be lost when you or perhaps your clan die. Even if you have writing, without the printing press and general education, more likely than not the person who could use your invention to build something better will never have heard about your work. Communication and trade was extremely slow until the invention of the telegraph basically, and regional disasters like drought could wipe out a lot of knowledge. Think how much progress was lost when the library in Alexandria burnt down.
Today I wanted to watch something while eating my breakfast, and recalled the 1978 "Connections" series[0], I've seen recommended on HN many times. I ended up binging first two episodes, and the second one[1] is quite relevant to your question. It tells a story of how discovery of a particular stone in ancient times, that allowed people to set a standard on precious metals, started a chain of discoveries and transformations that culminated in (spoiler, rot13) gur vairagvba bs enqne naq gur ngbzvp obzo. Of course, technologies have a dependency tree, not chain, but watching this episode you can get a feeling of how one invention enabled another, how all the pieces for a new breakthrough might be there, but the economics are not right yet to have them used, and how the accumulation of knowledge accelerated over time.
I highly recommend the episode, and judging by the first two, the whole series.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connec...
[1] - you can find it on dailymotion dot com slash video slash x2gohd2
We, the modern era, can hardly keep our oral traditions going for a 100 years.
Another fascinating fact: they did this, by fundamentally using a form of signed key - stories (oral traditions) were to be told in multiple languages; the language of ones own tribe, and of the tribe to which you journey. Only if those stories could be told in the same languages, were they persisted ..
I honestly think one of the biggest travesties of the modern era is that we ever considered such cultures 'inferior' to our own. They even had a version of the Hippocratic oath way before us .. we had 'miasma theory', they knew already about the antiseptic nature of plants .. they've operated the longest-still-operational mine in human history .. its just staggering.
Since every glyph in hebrew has a numerical value, the sum of all rows and the sum of all columns of a page can be computed. When making a copy, if these values don't match the master, that page is cut out and burned. There's been an effectively zero error rate in copies of the Torah for the last ~3,000 years.
IIRC, though, most of the texts of the dead sea scrolls, which are much older, were effectively identical too -- see the En Gedi copy of Leviticus from ~ 300 CE which was word-for-word identical.
What's the mystery? It wouldn't be surprising to see many representations of spears in so many ancient cultures: there were hunters / warriors right?
Well there were gatherers too. Handbag is just a natural design for this function.
As someone who has spent many thousands of hours foraging, I've got to disagree on there. You wouldn't be able to fit even one meal for a single person into a bag like that. Consider that a kilogram of mushrooms is only around 25 calories, and this bag probably wouldn't even fit that much. Clearly they would have gotten most of their calories from meat, but even still a bag like that wouldn't hold enough produce for even a modestly sized side of vegetables.
But keep in mind also that if you're hunting or foraging you're probably going to need more than just 2,000 calories or whatever.
Yes, I guess thats why you don't go after mushrooms when you are hungry out there. (unless you also have oil)
Like the other one said: you want berries, seeds, roots, bark (if you have to), eggs, honey, .... whatever you find that gives you energy.
Mushrooms are a nice addition. Maybe also a medicin or alike, but never something you can live from.
To vastly oversimplify: Religious/cultural sites become a center for pilgrimage, festivals, etc. Those lead to people being around, those people bring things with them that leads to trade, and eventually some people settle in the area for various reasons and then you have a village.
The assumption of its being religious is simple: it isn't shelter, and it has imagery resembling later depictions of religious figures in the region. Religion here is a more general term to encompass the intersection of culture and spirituality. Was it originally non-religious? If so, why aggregate for months to build a structure, before trade was valuable or very necessary?
Trade becomes more worthwhile when communities begin to specialise. When people are nomadic, they cross many lands, and can simply find what they want on the way (obsidian from the mountains, shells by the sea, berries, roots, and game in forests). When people begin to stay in one place, long distance travel for trade becomes more valuable. As soon as agriculture develops, we discover that obsidian shards from deposits in the Caucasus are found thousands of miles away in central Europe. You begin to have towns focusing on a specific resource, or serving a trade route as goods and people criss-cross the land (Jericho, among the earliest known cities, for example, was possibly involved in the trade of salt; few things can grow in the soil near it).
It is the same as between a spat and a war; gathering in a forest and farming. It is in scale and in character, a different beast.
It should also be noted that Gobekli Tepe was built several millenia before the beginning of the near-eastern Bronze Age. The reason it IS so fascinating is its having been built millenia before agriculture. The systems of religion, administration, and agriculture, did co-develop, but could only do so after the agricultural revolution.
Here is the clip: https://youtu.be/Nk3xdMkwMsE
Whether there's any scientific basis to Hancock's work, I'm not enough of an expert to tell.
If you had a particularly robust tribe, you would in a few generations outstrip the foraging capacity of your area. Nomadism helps but at some point your group may have to split in two to expand your radius. If you split on bad terms you might become rivals. But what if you split on good terms? You might never see your cousins again unless you made an effort. Let’s meet on this hilltop at the summer solstice every year. There will be too many of us to forage or hunt, so bring food and the hunters will find something else to do to fill the time.
We could wrestle. Or carve rocks or something. You know like grandpa Joe used to do. Man I miss grandpa Joe. Too bad about the bear.
(Common as it is, calling any ancient site a 'temple' without some pretty substantial evidence ... could be very misleading.)
https://www.robertschoch.com/sida.html
A bit of a stretch in this article but interesting.
https://www.harappa.com/content/upper-paleolithic-shrine-ind...