Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating. Whenever something like this comes up, I think of people like Terence McKenna or Graham Hancock. People who, admittedly, had some very out there ideas, but maybe not completely unfounded.

Do we really know how advanced ancient societies were, and what trade networks they had? Consider this:

> Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa

Did that happen without any societal involvement. Did humans just carry seeds like birds might, or was there an organized effort to spread agriculture like this?

> ... it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles."

I hope that we'll continue to learn more.

View on HN

Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliberate, people carried banana culms around with them in order to plant them as they traveled from island to island.

Um, that is only modern bananas. "old" bananas are mostly seed.

Yes, that's why I said "edible" bananas... those "mostly seed" ones aren't really edible, there's nothing to eat. The mutation / hybridization that resulted in seedless edible bananas must have preceded their being spread around by humans or we wouldn't have bothered.

Oh, anyone bothers if they get really hungry. Stone Age people were fairly resourceful when it came to food.

A friend of mine who used to hike in the Pyrenees had incredible stories regarding hunger and eating.

Care to share any of the stories? I think you'll find a receptive audience :)

The best one is probably this from the early 2000s.

They relied on a paper map only, no smartphones with GPS back then and they did not have any Magellan GPS. Taking a wrong turn somewhere, they added like 40 km to their intended trek, which in that terrain meant two days.

They ran out of food and she was so starved that she ate entire tube of her skin cream. Together with a few bugs that made their way into their tent.

Her description: it looked like yogurt with raisins, but I am not going to describe the taste.

No health consequences.

Southern France/Northern Spain is not a total wilderness. That level hunger after a two day detour implies a serious level of poor planning.

Well, it was their second tour of the Pyrenees. They have come back almost every year since 2001 and learned from their mistakes.

Eating skin cream after two days without food? There are people who recreationally fast for that length. There's something missing from this story.

She is tough, but very lean. Not that much body fat, so low reserves.

As for fasting. I fast sometimes, but I would not try fasting on a long hike in mountains like Pyrenees. Probably not even Tatras.

Depending on what's in the skin cream, it might not be an unreasonable thing to do. They often contain not much more than plant fats and stablilizers. Probably the perfume will make it taste foul, but it won't kill you.

Musa acuminata bananas, native to SE-Asia, and probably the sort talked about in this article, do have seeds, though the domesticated variants have significantly less. It seems highly unlikely that these particular bananas had no seeds.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_acuminata

> banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea

Super interesting. Reminded me that in Cuba there's a type of banana they call "guineo". I wonder if it's at all related to its origin.

Hmm, seems so, though a different Guinea! Very interesting:

> Guineos (pronounced [ɡiˈneos]) usually refers to an unripe banana. The term guineo is sometimes used in reference to its ripened counterpart: the yellow (ripened) banana. Etymology of the word Guineo comes from Guinea, a country in the west of Africa, as it is one of the places from which bananas originate.

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

Obviously this is oversimplified because some of the trips needed to cross huge oceans, but from Papua New Guinea to Ethiopia is only ~12,000 km. If people with bananas move 10 km every year, they will cross that distance in "only" 1,200 years.

And some people cover more than 10 km in a single day.

Fascinating indeed. Climate change goes far beyond CO2 levels. Another thing that we miss is our history before the last ice age, which still lies in complete mistery.

Complete is greatly overstating it. I've personally found stuff from approximately that time period and in general we have a decent idea how people lived and many of their technologies. There are issues pinning down details on specific groups, cultures and political organization, but nothing so unknown as to hide a large industrial society.

What about a small industrial society?

When we start getting into hypotheticals, it's useful to reframe the discussion in more concrete terms. What would it mean to have a "small industrial society"? I can think of a number of "things" that would fit that term:

1) Ancient Aliens: Essentially similar to what a human martian colony would look like. In this case, resources, population, and knowledge are brought from off-world and there's little to no local exploitation. The only way to detect something like this is direct material evidence, which also means it's practically unverifiable. Not really a useful hypothesis.

2) the dystopia: an anomalously advanced human society surrounded by hunter-gatherers in the wastelands outside. As a twist, the population is small and in-line with contemporaneous HG populations. One problem with this scenario is that it just doesn't look like any human society ever discovered. There's libraries worth of work on how technological development happens and the two big accelerators we see across most of history are high (effective) populations and communication "density". The lower either of these are, the more likely that the information network breaks down over time. At the population levels we're talking, simply having enough people to do all the various jobs that need doing in a high-tech society is a problem, let alone redundancy and exploration of new ones.

3) Non-human societies: Something incredibly old, non-human, and lost in the mists of time. This is where you get into the silurian hypothesis and given enough technology/magic/moved goalposts, it gets difficult to say anything concrete. There would probably still be evidence in some form or fashion, but ultimately you have to define some model of what the society looks like it to actually say anything about it.

How people maintained consistent culture--judging from cave paintings--across tens of millennia and thousands of miles, in and out of ice ages, is an enduring mystery.

There really is no shortage of mysteries, although archaeologists don't like to talk about them.

That Denisovan bracelet from tens of millennia ago, with a hole drilled by a method not reinvented until historical times, is a new mystery.

Miles and miles of undersea construction off India, on seabed last exposed more than 7000 years ago.

The very oldest known stone construction, in both Egypt and Peru, used the very biggest chunks of rock, often 50 tons and more, (apparently) before even pulleys. Blocks get progressively smaller and clunkier in later work.

Egyptian sculpture made of basalt and granite, smoothed to a satin finish. Basalt boxes, 50 tons and more, with perfectly right-angled and smooth interior cuts, without tool marks.

I'm not saying it's aliens, because... why the hell would aliens care about rocks? But people were doing things that we don't understand, and cannot reproduce with the tools they should have had.

There is a great deal more to learn about the prehistoric past than we have even begun to get a handle on.

My personal field experience is that cultures were not consistent across millennia and miles, but it can often be difficult to distinguish cultures purely from their material record, especially to modern eyes. In general, people tend to both underestimate what's possible and mistake natural landforms for human constructions. The Bosnian Pyramids and the Yonaguni Monument are prime examples.

Even experts sometimes screw this up. I've seen my share of cropmarks and straight "walls" on imagery that turn out to have perfectly natural explanations. My first field season was particularly memorable. I spent days sitting in a muddy trench, convinced I had found a posthole. A few feet below was the remains of a collapsed rabbit warren. Archaeology can be hard.

I refer to

https://www.ted.com/talks/genevieve_von_petzinger_why_are_th...

Can you link me some sources to your claims? Super fascinated and I wanna read more!

https://sci-hub.do/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aeae.2008.07.00...

"It is a common assumption that stone drilling originated during the Upper Paleolithic, but gained the features of a well-developed technology only during the Neolithic. The comparatively archaic method of two-handed drilling was replaced by the more efficient bow drill (Ibid.: 62). The process of stationary drilling, i.e., with the help of the bow drill, did not leave signs of drill vibration. These progressive features have been noted on the Denisova bracelet. It constitutes unique evidence on an unexpectedly early employment of two-sided fast stationary drilling during the Early Upper Paleolithic. All of the other known Paleolithic implements with signs of drilling bear features suggesting relatively slow drilling with a considerable drill vibration."

Incredible. Where should I look for the undersea building off India? Gives me huge Atlantis vibes, haha.

... like mass species extinction? Arguably as disturbing as global warming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com