Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

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I love reading about these finds. Animals are drawn with astounding detail and accuracy, while drawings of humans are absent or strikingly diminished stick figure forms. These anonymous drawings seem to predate the ego that dominates our world today.

This is truly the age of pure humanity. War was something that had to be invented, and only came about ~10k years ago. We are all descendants of the survivors of war, the most brutal and feared killers are our ancestors; the predisposition towards violence is in our blood. The humans who worked in these caves and elsewhere, consuming migratory reindeer and avoiding larger and more dangerous fauna, our ancestors slaughtered these men and enslaved these women. How different the world might be if war was never waged, it's hard to imagine as we've become so accustomed to constant warfare.

Many historians feel that the neolithic revolution, with the resulting social stratification and development of warfare that has been with us ever since, was the worst development in human history.

Just because there wasn't warfare doesn't mean there wasn't violence and blood feuds. That behavior has been seen even groups of other primates. If anything professional armies were an improvement because they laid the groundwork for a distinction between civilians and soldiers.

Violence happened but was generally something to avoid in the paleolithic due to the risk. It was too costly and it wasn't until the neolithic were population sizes high enough to make that cost worth while, and grain and resource storage made a worthwhile reward. Systematic warfare didn't appear until the neolithic, that's when we begin finding mass graves of peoples slaughtered by weaponry and more depictions of warfare in art.

The reason for the mass graves of course, is the increase in human population as a result of agriculture. It's not necessarily that as a percentage, you were less likely to be a victim of violence in the Paleolithic era.

We wouldn't even have history without the neolithic. We wouldn't have written language. We'd be forever in a holding pattern of hunterer-gatherer society. Now, while that may be cool in some aspects, a hunter-gatherer society is never going to land on the moon, explore the stars, destroy an asteroid with a collision course for earth, cure a disease that would wipe out the whole population, build flying machines and sailing machines to connect the whole globe, etc. Our chances of survival as a species have improved as a result of technology. And war has traditionally been one of the most motivating factors for the development of technology, for better or for worse.

>Our chances of survival as a species have improved as a result of technology.

I was totally with you up until this point. Modern humans have achieved amazing things, but have also invented whole new catagories of potential self inflicted catastrophies.

We are one nuclear war or environmental collapse away from being a complete failure of a culture, and taking thousands of other species down with us. The biggest modern advances have only just happened, in historical terms, and we've already had some very close calls, with more on the way.

Weirdly, the nuclear era has made a third world war less likely. Mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War to mostly proxy nations instead of an all out worldwide theater like occurred over the prior 300 years (going back to the Spanish vs. British vs. French in the colonial age).

Meanwhile, I suppose a super volcano or a shift to ice age temps would be disastrous for the environment and crop yields, but technology would be our only recourse for dealing with it and adapting to it.

I'll admit, there's trade-offs to modern tech. It's definitely a double-edged sword, and I'm not sure our physiological systems are well-tuned for modern society (i.e. hunting and gathering guaranteed an active lifestyle). But overall, I think it's a positive.

> Mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War to mostly proxy nations instead of an all out worldwide theater

I get the feeling you aren't familiar with Vasily Arkhipov or Stanislav Petrov. Sorry, you will probably feel depressed/sick. I do when I consider these events, and a weird sense of unreality and insanity.

It wasn't government policy that prevented nuclear war, but people disobeying orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

I’ll take the risk of nuclear war now versus the risk back then of dying from a bacterial infection because I scratched my foot.

> This is truly the age of pure humanity. War was something that had to be invented,

Chimps will tear apart rival tribes. Occam's razor would suggest these people would have been just as fearful of outside factors as most animals/tribes.

You are assigning some weird garden of eden analogy, that is not history, but wishful thinking. There is truth that homo sapien is probably the most violent, and perhaps that's also why it won out. Your comment about stick figures is also worthy of examination. But I think the leap to a `pure humanity` whatever that may mean is a bit of a stretch.

Is this an eons-long form of "it was better in the old days"? Just look at primates and other wild animals today to see brutal violence.

There's no proof of your assertion. In fact the fossil record shows evidence of interpersonal violence during the paleolithic.

I find your first line about diminished ego very poetic. I very much enjoyed thinking that thought.

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