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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?

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They weren't. Its just an incredibly hard climb.

That primitive technology guy on youtube spent several years trying to climb out of his personal stone age. Even with actual knowledge and a path forward, the most he got was a few iron prills after hours of hard labour.

I could get that much iron out of dirt in a few minutes by running a magnet through it. We've come a long way, and its easy to forget how much our process relies on 6000 years of "ah-ha!" and hard labour.

This question assumes a lot... and that isn't what happened.

I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment.

What made them start civilization?

Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.

To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor.

Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...

Not just that, but beer can make you braver and more willing to challenge the status quo.

Ah yes, the Beer Hall Putsch!

I've long wondered about the generational effects on human physiology and cognition from pregnant women drinking alcohol.

Excessive consumption causes Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but there is no sharp cut off.

Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies.

Nobody likes to talk about it, though.

We spent ~millions of years before that only occasionally changing the shape of our stone tools, and it seems like we had full power brains for much of that time. Sometimes you just don't have the spare calories.

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