Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Ancient peoples and societies were very advanced. We constantly find earlier and earlier evidence of advanced behavior and technology because they were using it. People 10k years ago are physiologically the same as us, and human nature does not change, so it isn't surprising that many wanted to live in dense communities, just as we do.

The major difference is imagining that you have no knowledge of science. As humans desire control, your brain immediately assumes that gods cause everything, and then to get more control society starts believing they can influence and appease the gods through various rituals, which then develop into organized religion. The total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us, and certainly to nearly everyone on Hacker News, which is the biggest barrier to imagining yourself living back then.

Otherwise, people fell in love, had children, desired to achieve, were constantly striving and innovating, and all of the same types of people and desires that we have today, leading to kings, wars, commerce, and so on.

Visiting Herculan in Italy (the _much_ better preserved sister city to Pompeii) really put those kind of things for me into perspective.

There are street numbers, pubs, fast food joints, various multi story buildings with some of the murals intact, especially the gymnasium/public baths really showed to me - “I could totally see myself living in this kind of environment” it was … weird and uncanny, but very educational experience.

On Pompei and graphitti, dick jokes and so on, some things never change.

Also, I saw 3D Roman recontructions on house blocks. They looked pretty the much same as any house block in Spain on any town/village in the 21th century. Crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulae

I think there is a systematic bias in our perception of ancient peoples that is influenced by the scarcity of archeological evidence, combined with a common logical fallacy. Until we have evidence that people did X before year Y, we are biased towards assuming they did not.

We continuously hear headlines of the form “discovery people did X before previously thought.” But why did we think they did not do those things earlier?

The fallacy is to be over conservative and assume that if we have no evidence that something happened, it probably didn’t.

But our prior assumption should be that the earliest evidence for X is much later than the first X.

That is the prior assumption for archaeologists. For a long time, it was simply treated as "obvious" and there wasn't a well-established way to estimate temporal ranges from dated finds. Now people use a technique called Optimal Linear Estimation that was originally invented by paleontologists to estimate extinction dates.

I think in my lifetime I’ve started to see the articles morphing a bit more towards “pushes back the date for the first evidence of people doing X”, which is a better spirit of discovery to express. This may be the result of choosing better magazines to read though, too. :)

> total integration of religion with every facet of life is alien to most of us

I suspect there’s still a lot of bias in this view. A fish likely doesn’t realize it lives in water. Similarly, we likely don’t appreciate the role of our modern “religious beliefs” and how saturated our lives are with them and how they have permeated our methods of interpreting experience (physical or cultural). It’s alien to us only in hindsight and removed from the cultural context, but in a thousand years I suspect we’ll be no more immune from criticism.

Agreeing entirely with your other points, we are after all only human. There’s great conceit in our perception of past generations, and this gets more shameless the further back we look and especially across cultural divides.

Inevitably, we must state that they incorporated more supernatural explanations for physical phenomenon than we do today. It’s probably specifically this narrower point that would be alien to most of us.

You got it right. But I want to add that civilizations began when man moved to farming and didn't have to hunt for food.

How can you state they had no knowledge of science? How do you think they built things like pyramids and countless other mega structures that are exactly aligned with the solar system?

I think this goes to a question of what we mean when we say science. If someone has knowledge of where all the stars are and their movements, but thinks of those stars as gods and believes that their movements affect sickness on Earth, is that science, religion, or some combination?

I don't think it's possible to develop the ability to predict astronomical events without a lot of work analogous to modern science. Sure it was probably couched in some spiritual terms that we wouldn't recognize, but it's probably not all that different to how people will view our modern science in thousands of years.

As an Andean Native-American I think that there were some things that were science, like being able to tell time and the seasons by their star observatories. And then there was religion around a planet or the moon.

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