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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Let's not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.

And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it's apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity's existence.

So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I'm simplifying a very great deal.)

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Anatomically modern vocal chords only developed sometime between ~80000 to ~40000 BCE. So although that’s still quite a lot of time, it’s less than what is implied with cranial structure.

It’s actually surprising how late and relatively sudden vocal chords developed compared to the rest of the body, as what ‘humans’ had prior was totally incapable of modern speech. It’s an unresolved mystery I believe.

Wow we must have been brilliant in other ways that we can't even imagine

Where did you get that range from? Anatomically modern humans are generally considered to predate at least 200kya and most of the synthetic literature I've read considers speech likely in archaic humans (otherwise a huge, unwieldy tongue doesn't make much sense). It's also pretty hard to get morphology timelines as restricted as 40k years, especially with soft tissues and the inherent preservation issues.

it is possible to speak without vocal cords, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

Very cool. Also there are click languages. Given how much harder clicks are to regular vocalization, I wonder if they could be the remainders of some earlier languages before human vocalizations fully developed.

> Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton.

It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically proved it. That's pretty fast, really.

> That's pretty fast, really.

Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

You know that Newton didn't "discover gravity," right? He discovered how it explained planetary motion.

And it's not fair to start the clock before we got the heliocentric theory (although Aristarchus of Samos gets an honorable mention).

As I said, I'm simplifying a great deal. I imagine people before Newton noticed that if you don't hold things up, they fall.

> Our ancestors 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

Newton had to invent calculus to make the proof.

You're not simplifying anything; you just got confused. And that's ok, honestly. There is literally not a person on this planet, now or ever, who didn't have holes in their knowledge or had something confused. It happens.

Come on, you know what he meant. Newton was the first to discover the laws of gravity, even though we still do not understand how gravity works and even though primitive animals can "discover" gravity.

What he said: not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

What I said: what Newton formulated was not “things fall down”.

And you’re taking the time to correct.. me?

The tone implies that you think the first statement is wrong in some way, but it's still not clear why.

Their comment was bring it back around to the original topic of the thread: the entire scope of homo sapiens sapiens existence and how long it took us to figure things out in relation to that.

You're trying to limit the scope to just the time period where the rest of the necessary knowledge had been discovered, while everyone else is counting the discovery of that background knowledge as part of the process.

Babies like to play that game where they'll drop a spoon or something from their highchair as many times as you'll keep handing it to them. I like to call this "gravity testing".

Most parents like to call it "patience testing" :-)

The Orphics had a heliocentric model of the universe before Aristarchus; in fact, the Derveni Papyrus, one of the oldest witnesses to Orphic thought, is actually a commentary on Orphic literature that interprets it all as physical allegory. Only Dionysus knows where the Orphics got that stuff, along with what we now call astrology: from the Phoenicians perhaps? Someone synthesizing Babylonian and Egyptian observations?

>Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.

Until the invention of writing, all knowledge was conveyed via oral traditions.

As such, the work of Copernicus and Newton would have been impossible for the humans of 10-15,000 years ago, since both required both recorded knowledge and thinking about planetary bodies as well as centuries of recorded planetary movements.

Without the benefit of recorded history of science, technology and the natural world, those folks would never have been able to accomplish their good works, as Newton himself (as well as many others prior to him) put forward[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

When you think about it, the amount of necessary prior knowledge is massive. You have to know that planets have an elliptical orbit. Except for Mercury, all five classically known planets (and the Earth) have eccentricity of only a few percents (and Mercury is pretty hard to observe), so you need someone (that is, Tycho Brahe) who could spend years looking at the night sky, recording the precise location of each planet, enough math for someone to match it to an elliptical orbit observed from another (= Earth's) elliptical orbit, and a society that can support such a "useless" hobby.

Someone else brought up planetary orbits as a prerequisite. Is there no other way to work out the laws of gravity? Again, we're talking about 200,000 years.

But yes, there's the larger point that Newton also needed mathematics and other things. And the laws of gravity might not be the perfect example of my point, but my point isn't about Newton or gravity.

I think there's no other way. You have to observe the fact that the attractive force obeys the inverse square law. That's not measurable with experiments here on earth without extremely advanced modern instruments, so that makes it's effects only really observable on the motion of astronomical bodies. Historically this was the observation that orbits follow elliptical paths. Absent that you'd need some other observation that would lead you to the same conclusion.

Very insightful hypothesis, thank you.

I often wonder how close the ancients were to all the knowledge we take for granted.

So much lost forever in all those burned libraries.

You can see societies that lack the knowledge even today. You can see that even in 'scientific' societies, many people lack that knowledge ...

They were too busy not dying of starvation to think about gravity.

> So it takes more than brains.

yep, it takes society. Newton's law is not Newton's law, its a mental state of a bunch of communicating homo sapiens. Had he died of a pandemic somebody else would have "discovered" it in a decade or two.

I broadly agree and many discoveries are made independently at the same time, after that ~199,000ky delay (including some of Newton's, such as calculus).

But what is "society"? What are you proposing as the mechanism?

it is the quality of the communication channels (the signal to noise ratio) between individuals. Diffusion of high quality information (from any early age) is what enables individuals to both internalize state-of-the-art collective mental models and incrementally contribute their own bit.

in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives

Very interesting ideas, thanks. At least today, your theory played out.

>in theory with the use of digital networks we should have a quantum leap forward but I am not sure we have seen yet any dividend of that. our collective (digitally intermediated) brain has been hijacked by less noble objectives

It's not just less noble objectives. With high quality information available, people still choose poor info or mis/disinfo. Nobody I know is interested in quality information, even very educated people. Even here on HN, most sources are Wikipedia.

> Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.

Humans had larger brains in hunter & gatherer times. Similar to domesticated animals, it got smaller once we settled down and started agriculture.

I don’t think the correlation between brain size and general intelligence is that strong. Maybe the hunter gatherer used a bigger part of his brain to quickly and accurately interpret impressions, to find the food and not become food himself. The domestic man might have been better at tasks like figuring out how much of his seeds he could eat and how much he must save to plant next spring, even with a slightly smaller brain.

Wut... This guy is from the 14th century, which is a relatively modern era, where gun powder was starting to being used. This is just a century before the start of the renaissance, and we are not talking about thousands of years ago.

Bronze worked well for weapons, but was rare. Iron democratized the making of weapons, available almost everywhere on Earth except Japan.

But watch modern people try to smelt iron on Youtube in their backyard.

Very difficult and time-consuming, and very toxic.

Iron smelter staff around 1900 only lived to maybe age 30 before their lungs gave out.

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