Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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Two things spring to mind:

The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she learned language. We'll probably never know what language existed 50,000+ years ago, how sophisticated or simple it was and how it affected how our ancestors thought.

The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked. So would we even be able to relate to Homo Sapiens (or Neanderthals for that matter).

Some things we'd be able to related to (eg the earliest burial rites we've found evidence were from ~75,000 years ago) but I imagine a lot we simply couldn't.

Some Neanderthal DNA exists in the modern gene pool. That itself raises many questions. Was this violent? How was it viewed? Were these people viewed the same? How dominant were large family/tribal groups?

I mean Ridley Scott's The Last Duel features the last instance in France of its eponymous jurisprudence technique which came from Germanic tribal law before they were even literate (Germanic tribal warlords becoming the aristocracy everywhere but Ireland in post-Roman Western Europe), and this is about 500 or 600 years ago, never mind how much further back into the Bronze or previous time periods that dueling as juridical adjudication came from and what the world looked like to make such an idea palpable.

Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?

My grandfather grew up on a farm and never went to high school (which was a perfectly fine life decision in that milieu) and fought in WWII at 16 by lying about his age cause there were no birth certificates to prove otherwise

I think we very much underestimate how different human reality is as far back as 4000 years ago, nevermind 50k

> Wasn't an American President killed in a pistol duel not 130 years ago or so?

You're probably thinking of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who died of his wounds from a duel with Vice-President Aaron Burr. It was 1804.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel

I believe Andrew Jackson killed a man in a duel before he became President: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/andrew-jackson-k...

> The second is the evidence we have from the ancient world, which was a mere 2,000 years ago. We have written records going back another 3,000-4,000 years before that. I find this period fascinating for many reasons but a big one is how alien we would find the ethics and how societies worked

Can you elaborate some more on these differences? I’d love to learn more.

Look into Roman and Greek history. Slavery, the treatment of slaves, the attitudes towards minors (slaves and otherwise) for sexual purposes and so on. It's actually pretty abhorrent.

Another example: the origin of the word "decimate". "Decimation" was a Roman military punishment to military units in provinces that rebel against Rome. I don't believe it was widespread but it was common enough to spawn the modern word. "Deci-" here is Latin meaning "10". The punishment was this: soldiers (typically) were put in groups of 10. Each group was responsible for picking which of those 10 would die and be responsible for killing that person. The general way Rome quashed rebellion in general was brutal.

The amazing thing we actually have first hand accounts on Rome's military conquests in the forms of the writings of Julius Caesar (eg with the conquest of Gaul, which was essentially genocide). Now first hand accounts aren't necessarily accurate (eg Herodotus tended to embellish) but there are other accounts that lend a lot of credence to Caesar's accounts.

There's plenty of horrific human-on-human violence in the 20th century, so I find this claim that the Romans were so different quite unconvincing.

Romans appeared to have a more casual acceptance of violence than those of us in modern Western civilization. We moderns might actually kill more people in wars (and related genocides), but we still regard those deaths as exceptional aberrations rather than a normal part of daily life.

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