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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

A useful heuristic as far as I know is to imagine "what would a modern human do in that environment?"

Make foraging plans, tell stories, bicker, gossip, predict weather, teach toolmaking and clothesmaking, discuss fair allocation of resources, arrange parties, celebrate relationships, make gifts, design song performances, learn dance moves, coordinate construction, agree on repairs for criminal damages, learn local and exotic flora, plan long travels to faraway lands, and the list goes on.

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As far as geniuses go, many of the people we would think of as geniuses today have two things the people we are discussing here had not:

- They are able to stand on the shoulders of a far broader range of giants, thanks to writing; and

- They have access to far more tools of reasoning (arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!) that those in the past did not have.

So while there may well have been intellectual equals to the geniuses of today also back then, they would not have been able to perform the feats of geniuses today. Again, for lack of tooling, not wit.

> arithmetic with Roman numerals is just the start!

Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is awful.

Hindu numerals if we have to be precise, transmitted to the west by Arabs

Right, true--the term I've most often heard in Western circles these days is "Hindu-Arabic" numerals, but I didn't want to confuse.

I've also heard the term Western Arabic, contrasted with Eastern Arabic.

> Arabic, I think you mean. Arithmetic with Roman numerals is awful.

Hindu numerals, do you mean?

Why Hindu (the religion) and not Hindi (the language)?

I really don't know. It's generally phrased as Hindu-originating - I can only speculate why it's now attached to a religious / social group rather than a language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu%E2%80%93A...

...of course. Roman numerals held us back for centuries. Sorry about that embarrassing brainfart.

I guess for now we can't know - but were they truly modern humans? They might have had the same hardware but the cultural/consciousness software may have been far different than what we have today. It's fun to think about, books like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind or the Sapiens both explore some version of this.

Fart jokes. I absolutely guarantee you, the were fart jokes.

All creditable goal. What about warefare?

>what would a modern human do in that environment?

and be sure to knock them in the head (and everyone that you want to bring with them) so they won't remember anything. I doubt they are any different than a hairless monkey. One thing that we got going for us is the written/oral knowledge that we have accumulated.

This is probably closer to the truth. We don’t notice the benefits of modern society and institutions because they are the water that we swim in, they have “always” existed since we were born into them. We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law. I believe the reasons why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle were more to do with man’s inhumanity to man than it was a reluctance to leave some imagined eden.

A George Carlin quote comes to mind:

Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.

> We are blissfully unaware that a few short centuries ago people often behaved in much more depraved ways as soon as they were far enough away from the tenuous rule of law.

What makes you think this is true? I have plenty of experience of people who play very nicely with each other, even when they are for all practical purposes not bound by law to.

> why it took us a hundred thousand years to escape a subsistence lifestyle

You use the word "escape" as though we are universally better off now than when we spent a few hours a day foraging. Do you have evidence for this? What if people preferred to live their lives the way they did -- much like, I suppose, you prefer to live life the way you do?

(No doubt do many people now have it better than many people then, but it sounds like you're asserting that the opposite is not the case too.)

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