Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

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Once we learn to control antimatter it will be bad day for the Galaxy.

>lead us to hypothesize that at the latest by 400,000 y ago, hominin subpopulations encountered one another often enough and were sufficiently tolerant toward one another to transmit ideas and techniques over large regions within relatively short time periods.

The study suggests pretty "rosy" cultural diffusion. Would say capturing/kidnapping and forcing to divulge the secret qualify as sufficiently tolerant transmission of ideas? Imagine the smell of cooking meat coming from the other side of the valley while you're chewing on a piece of raw meat under the cold rain :)

I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result.

Another possible interpretation is "genetic transmission" instead of "cultural transmission" like it is suggested for the stone tools here (while i don't agree with such hypothesis (pity as it leads to a lot of interesting conclusions, including ones about modern world), people do write scientific articles on it)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/#:~:tex...

The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone.

Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of the past").[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Sava...

I agree with your main point that prehistoric warfare and violence was not rare.

I'm not sure I'd frame it as most scholarly works getting this wrong. Almost all scholarship I've encountered in the last 25 years agrees with the position that both prehistoric warfare was common and that relationships between hunter gather societies often included violence. There is an open question of exactly how violent (extremely violent, frequently violent), but one would be hard pressed to find credible scholars arguing that mass violence was almost unheard of in pre-history.

Going all the way back to John Locke in the 18th Century and before that to Biblical understandings of pre-history there was a notion that past human arrangements were extremely violent. There was some trendy early and mid 20th Century scholarship that attempted to argue that mass violence was a disease of the civilized societies, but such arguments were, as far as I can tell, only fashionable because they rejected the assumed status-quo.

>I wonder can it instead of "transmission" be that the fire-capable just out-competed the rest and dominantly spread all over the place as a result

One argument against that is that transmission is much more frequent than replacement in human history. We have countless examples of technologies (agriculture and writing notably) being transmitted to different cultures, whereas the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare.

>the examples of cultures out-competing and replacing others through technology are rare

Alexander the Great - phalanx with resulting spread of Greek culture over all the Middle East, Roman Empire - countless advantages over the cultures they dominated, Vikings - sea faring ships and navigation, Columbus+/Americas and the whole colonial period across the world, ...

I used the word culture but I really meant population in the sense that the original commenter used it (i.e. a group of people replacing or displacing another, rather than imposing their customs on another).

Except for the last one, you're describing transmission not replacement.

That's exactly what happened in Europe, though:

Farmers moved in from the near East and replaced previous populations of hunters gatherers.

There is a continuum between transmission and replacement.

The Japanese adopting democracy after WWII was almost pure transmission; the population stayed basically the same.

The Holocaust was almost pure replacement; only a few people from mixed families survived in some areas.

But "something in between" is much more typical. Contemporary Iran is as much a heir to ancient Persia as it is to the Arab conquest and Islamization. Roman conquest of Britain led to a significant population admixture from the rest of the Empire and Romanization of local Celts at the same time. Expansion of Germans through Central and Eastern Europe in 12th-18th century was a thorough mix of replacement and transmission.

We would see genetic evidence of that, but it's missing. So cultural diffusion is most likely.

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