Genes reveal striking diversity within similar ice age cultures
science.org
science.org
But there's so much complexity to human culture that's simply lost to time and decay, that we will never see.
EDIT: Consider hypothetically, what would happen if far-future archaeologists were to dig up material culture from Quebec, but also hypothetically did not have any language (written, or recorded) or historical knowledge? They'd look at the material culture -- and even maybe genetics -- and be mostly unable to tell the difference between the Quebecois and the surrounding North American cultures. In most respects this is just standard North American material culture. But it's a totally different culture, speaking French etc, with its own distinct history, politics, etc.
Need that time machine.
I'll be honestly surprised if I can still access all my pictures stored today in the cloud by the time I'm in my seventies, 40 years from now. All it takes is a banned account, a forgotten password, one too many lost MFA factors, and bye bye data.
And what access do biographers have to the email accounts of people today?
People used to leave behind a lifetime of paper notes and correspondence, read any biography and you will see this. After the 90s, I think that will just stop being available.
Or it's the opposite, because most of the electronic records will be lost. Depends on how far ahead you look for those future archeologists.
If you want to keep stuff for millennia you need clay tablets and stone, not USB sticks and magnetic tapes. Even microfilm - used extensively only a decades ago - is not all that durable (although it's better than electronic storage - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/micro...).
Never mind anyone trying to read some PDF a thousand years from now, even if they somehow have the bits and bytes.
Lots of articles about this, just one random example link: https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/will-histor...
Some think at least the important stuff is safe - but the problem is, unlike a stone stele, or a clay tablet by chance stored under just the right conditions, electronic records need to be actively managed and occasionally transferred to new media. It won't survive the millennia without active intervention. So the idea that our important historic electronic data is safe rests on the assumption that there will always be librarians who take care of save storage and occasional replication, and maintenance of the needed equipment. I think that's quite optimistic.
Actually, there's a better way: Religion! Religion will have people devoting their lives to copying things generation after generation.
We just need a new religion that devotes their time and (collective) resources into the preservation of all things digital. Something like archive.org but with groups of people gathering every Sunday to copy (and catalog) each other's data.
Sure, the majority of the archives will probably consist of porn but that is also one of the most likely artifacts to be found at any given archeological site (aka little statues/carvings of a, "fertility goddess"). So... more of the same sort of discoveries by archeologists of the future who get access to the Church of the Digital God's archives.
All sorts of symbolism and mysticism was attributed to the artefacts that were buried with the unfortunate pair. But if you would consider really objectively, how would such a pair be buried today and what would our thoughts be?
I feel it would be fitting to bury the baby in the crib she was received in, a swan wing being a pretty convenient object to receive a newborn in. And the girl might be buried with her most prized collection, the reindeer teeth that her dad would gift her every time he returned from a successful hunt.
Just basic human things, not even much to do with culture, just these individuals and their circumstances.
Take stone tool making -- an art that goes back beyond our species, to the homo genus itself, as a universal hominid skill. Now mostly lost to us. That's kind of sad.
Civilization is all about denying your nature in order to build a better way of life based on stacks of technology. This isn't a bad thing, I would also rather live in a modern society, it's just really confusing unless you work out the ways in which your brain is not actually suited for it and how to cope with this.
It's not sad! We have much better ways to make tools these days. It's like lamenting the lost art of (incredibly tediously) drawing out circuit boards or drafting blueprints by hand.
Will people of the future be sad about having lost the art of finding things to do while a progressive JPEG (porn) loaded over a dialup connection?
Then abruptly lost around the Paleolithic to Neolithic transition really. Apart from a few anthropologists who've studied to try to recreate the technique.
It essentially "defined" what it is to be human for over a million years, and we can't do it anymore. I'm not saying it's a useful skill, only that this is a piece of cultural memory lost and that's kind of sad.
It's not like hand-etching circuit boards, which is nothing more than a transitory technique to accomplish a goal until we found a new way. Stone tool making (and language) is what distinguished us from every other species on the planet, and was one of the central activities that people did with their time for hours on end, and is probably one of the key things that got us to "sharpen" our problem-solving brains and develop the other skills we rely on now.
That "totaly" seems just wrong to me.
The cultures are incredibly similar in how they live, which is why they leave the same artefacts. A pair of truly different cultures would be something like pre-colonisation Maori and the ancient Hittites.
As a Canadian, I love Quebec but it feels distinctly quite different. And the point of my comparison here not to compare situations like Maori and now, but that two cultures can be side by side and have a 90% same material (and even genetic) make-up, while still having entirely different linguistic, political and historical aspects. That would not be observable in a purely material analysis, a few thousand years down the line.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10714-x
> "Furthermore, it is possible to conclude that the Late Epigravettian population had high degree of quarry-fidelity; they left the basin when these mammals vanished."
The notion of hunter-gather societies living harmoniously in equilibrium with nature that some people seem to view as an optimal societal arrangement doesn't fit very well with this scenario. Granted, it's unlikely that they wanted to hunt all the large animals to extinction, but it's another case of not having knowledge about the long-term consequences of their actions (which is not an excuse for human behavior today, however).
In my research, it seems to follow pretty closely that within 5,000-10,000 years of humans arriving in a territory with abundant mega-fauna, that the megafauna are completely wiped out. However the increase in global temperature put additional pressure on mega-fauna as the earth warmed
My naiive interpretation is that climate warming into the Holocene put significant pressures on mega-fauna ecology, and humans took advantage of these new pressures and over-consumed the fauna. They did not realize there was such a thing as "running out of food."
It seems pretty clear to me that 200,000-10,000BC was this kind of wonderland of human growth because all of the conditions were perfect for humans to just totally dominate the landscape with relative ease.
The problem is, we are just smart enough as a group to mess things up really efficiently for short term benefits (within two generations), but we're not smart enough to act as though we're planning for 5-10 generations into the future.
[1] Christopher, S., et.al. (2014). Global late quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
[2] Ellis, E.C. (2021) People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (17).
[3] Stewart, M., Carleton, W.C. & Groucutt, H.S. (2021) Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America. Nat Commun 12, 965.
We could be smart enough. All the past cultures with monuments were building them to last.
I wouldn't call that being "smart as a group"
However I think Ozymandias is a good reminder here
Meanwhile africa didn't have this extinction event and their megafauna is still intact regardless of humans. Well, now with gunpowder and whatnot they're threatened but it's not like stone age hunter gatherers had guns to shoot mammoths with.
The research seems to indicate that the overlap was from ~150,000BC until the QME crash ~10,000BC that you describe.
So, the answer would be "for the majority of anatomical Human's history until they all died off"
>Early modern human (EMH) or anatomically modern human (AMH)[1] are terms used to distinguish Homo sapiens (the only extant Hominina species) that are anatomically consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in contemporary humans from extinct archaic human species. This distinction is useful especially for times and regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe. Among the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens are those found at the Omo-Kibish I archaeological site in south-western Ethiopia, dating to about 233,000[2] to 196,000 years ago,[3] the Florisbad site in South Africa, dating to about 259,000 years ago, and the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco, dated about 315,000 years ago.
This is THE most important distinction to make as people seem to think that Humans prior to the year zero were neandertal or some proto-human
Humans just like you and me are about 200,000 years old
https://www.csus.edu/indiv/k/kusnickj/geology105/modelpaper....
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911...
[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/last-lonely-woolly-m...
Where is this notion? I've been involved in environmental circles and humans wiping out mammoths, giant sloths in south america, or logging easter island to bareness are pretty well known.
It is associated with the controversial phrase "noble savage", which is sometimes said sincerely and sometimes sneeringly.
The difference was in the environment:
1. Humans were a *tiny* but growing population (estimated <2M by 50,000BC)
2. The population of fauna and foragable food was in ridiculous abundance
3. Climate was in a Goldilocks period for human growth coming out of an ice age
So when humans got to certain population sizes and consumed most of the easy to access food, the whole system collapsed and got flipped upside down into what we have today: society based on excludable property instead of a society based on communal sharing
The distinction between agriculturalists and nomadic hunters in my estimation is that it was a rapid shift in the majority behavior but there was always some "mix" of nomadic and agricultural starting around 150,000BC
It's just that the shift went from 90% nomadic to 99% agricultural over the span of only 100k years or so
This misperception exists largely because most of the population was wiped out by introduced disease long before European colonization happened in earnest in most areas. (Read 1491 by Charles Mann.)
Read the Egalitarian Continent chapter in Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Content. Cahokia is specifically covered including how the communal nature of the civilization shifted over time to something more autocratic and materialistic, and how the shift contributed to the collapse of that society.
Hämäläinen's book is widely thought of as trying to stretch a pretty weak and biased historical narrative, and presents a far from universally accepted view of history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent...
Deranged: 1) Disordered; especially, disordered in mind; crazy; insane. 2) disturbed or upset, especially mentally 3) insane
It's not "my assumption," that it's a personal attack, it's the english language. An idea can't be disordered in mind, disturbed mentally, or insane. Only a person can be.
Second, go back and reread your comments and omit the derision. It adds nothing at all to your argument, in fact, it's much more compelling without it.
I just don't care enough to argue with you about the meaning of "communal" to try and change your mind. Your language choices clearly signal me that you're not open to changing your mind. Instead it signals that you're more interested in dunking than engaging. The Coddling of the American Mind is not about hacker news or my personal choice to ignore you for being rude. It's about institutions. If you want a more relevant book to this conversation, I'd suggest How To Win Friends and Influence People or The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively.
It completely changed HOW humans organized around resources
From the link:
>Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors
This is based on thorough research linked in the paper and indicates that the PRESSURE from the change in hunting types, caused the innovation of private property in order to maintain the relative ease of calorie access compared with smaller fauna hunting (which was done also).
Think about it like this, if your lifestyle is nomadic and you more or less follow herds around eating them (and any foraging) as necessary and then those herds die off, it completely changes how you live. Certain groups became great small game hunters, some became fishermen, some decided to be more agrarian etc...but the reality was that the lifestyle completely changed basically overnight (in evolutionary terms) and humans had to adapt as a result.
There's a ton of variability in response starting in 10k BC, but the longer term iterated "optimal" resource production very clearly became intensive agriculture and animal husbandry - at the cost of our actual humanity in my opinion.
The relationship between writing and property has even more issues and they're usually circularly linked. Property rights are difficult to understand from the archaeological record alone, so the vast majority of work done has been at least partially based on literary sources. This in turn makes it look like "literate societies" (what a terrible term, ugh) are the ones who have property rights. At the same time, archaeologists have long used definitions that more or less guide what they consider a "civilization" to look like that has traditionally included criteria like writing. Certain philosophical schools (like Marxism) relate social/political/economic development to these stages, and thus implicate certain productive relations simply based on the presence of other features like writing, even if it remains untranslated. This is what's happened with Harappan archaeology for example.
They might have universal relations, but the currently available evidence is very unclear about that and I'd recommend against strong statements about either the nature or timeline of that relationship.
Sedentism and property started in my estimation 6000 years before writing
So I think you're arguing with yourself
The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME) was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC.
We don't need to wade through the literally contradictory citations noted for this proposition; it's ridiculous enough to reject on sight. 39,000 years is "extremely rapid" on a cosmic scale but not on a human one. It's not as though big game hunters were flying airplanes around the globe to collect trophies. People in e.g. northern Europe didn't share anything cultural with people in e.g. southeast Asia. Humans responded to ecological reality, but it most likely did not take the form that you claim.
It's easy to convince yourself of this. In our time, modern agriculture and modern chemical manufacturing provide food for most of us, but not all. In remote locations throughout the world, right now but more significantly within the last millennium, indigenous neolithic populations support and have supported themselves in "the old ways". That is, even though no giant ground sloths exist (although large mammals such as buffalo, elk, moose, elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, etc. do) and even though modern humans have been consuming most global resources, these isolated tribes have successfully fed themselves. They have been visited by anthropologists who have recorded their lifestyles of e.g. monkey hunting, clam digging, or swidden agriculture. They don't starve and they don't hoard. In most locations, meat makes up less than half of the diet. Foraging plants and consuming small game isn't strange and isn't inefficient. That is what hominids have done throughout our existence.
As we know from ecology, the particular species that make up a trophic level do not change the fact that energy flows up the food chain. Perhaps koalas might die out if eucalyptus disappears, but humans are highly creative and adaptable to various food baskets. Your speculative, ecologically unlikely argument needs more support than an "imagine you're a nomad" just-so story. For one thing, we "evolved" to eat fruit not mastodons. Some of us have eaten mastodon when it has been available, but it has only ever been available on a small portion of earth's landmass. When mastodons disappeared that probably caused some people to starve but starvation is a common cause of death for any predator. That's why humans in the state of nature typically eat plants that they forage: to avoid starvation.
I mostly agree with the "against the grain" hypothesis, but it has been covered better elsewhere. I haven't spent enough time thinking about your later propositions to judge them. This paper may be recoverable with some editing.
[0] http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers...
>This paper may be recoverable with some editing.
Here's the google docs link if you want to propose edits or branch it where you think appropriate:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-NnqWaLl9xmNmEUaSArrNHiI...
I encourage anyone who wants to make the theory more robust to jump in please
Edit: I literally put contradictory citations about causal factors for QME in *intentionally* in order to acknowledge and reference the variability of the state of understanding as to WHY the QME happened - and bolster that it did happen.
I became a bit of a amateur nutritional geneticist over the last ten years it I have cured my self (mostly) of schizoaffective bipolar disorder as well as my anklosing spondylitis through a mixture of genetics, diet and supplements.
Our genes are shaped by our environment, and that was true even back 30,000 years ago. They say in that article
"Despite broadly similar hunting and gathering lifestyles, people in Western Europe remain genetically distinct from those east of the Baltic Sea."
Hinting and gathering what? Fish or plants? That difference will change FADS1 and FADS2 genetics in a few generations.
And we all carry genetics older than our great grandparents from divers places and everyone things we should all be eating the same food and living the same life.
And in he end they lay it down to population mixing! MAybe it has more to do with environmental pressures.
There is only so much that can be gleaned from found evidence. The customs and assumptions of our time also affect the way we reconstruct these stories and civilizations.
In many cases, the archaeological evidence is never even recovered: our entire civilization lives above those that came before us. Sometimes, even outright fabrication is allowed for decades[1][2] in the guise of "advancement of Science™".
In my opinion, musing about "different populations" on the basis of subtle positioning of things is an exercise in futility. Even with genetic evidence, there is very little that can be said about the relationship between those peoples and the things found -- maybe those were relics carried by outsiders, or remorse by genociders (a population does not just "vanish") or really anything else.
Even when closely examining large structures like the Great Pyramid, there's evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own[3][4]. Uncanny coincidences that do not make sense[5] but readily integrate into our myths surround us[6] and are often destroyed by us[7].
So what really is the best way to figure out our past? As with most things, accountability over a long period of time. Humans have trouble keeping history straight over even a few decades. Knowledge lost to out of date customs, or just plain language idiosyncrasies[8] can make even the recent past opaque to most.
Even the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to be tampered with: statues of the bull-rider (Enkidu) predate the tablets by many, many years, from before Gilgamesh's reign.
We've found that dogs were domesticated over a long period of time. That means there were many, many accidents along the way. Even Woolly Mammoth bones found under cliffs meant there were very intelligent hunters among us. Even the fact that a species survived thousands of years of sub-zero temperatures should stop us in awe. We live in the Holocene, which seems to be life on easy mode: good temperatures, just enough CO2 and conditions favorable to analog information archiving, enabling civilization, hard industry and easy transport, with an easily targetable animal population.
This is what I think is true: at some point, the human(oid?)s living in sync with their environment were disrupted by another group, and this group was so fundamentally alien to whatever the norm was, that it quickly conquered most of the planet. Its superiority in numbers seems to have been great enough to enable similar outcomes for groups separated by great distances. Most of the evidence points to that group being us, that we likely genocided many, many humanoid races just to get here.
Here's a poem that I like, that seems to convey similar emotion: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
And at the risk of making this entire post sound like satire (it's not), here's some links to the Finno-Korean Hyperwar of 8245BC[9][10][11][12]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...
[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20220516153818/http://johnhawks.n...
[3]: https://www.gizapower.com/Advanced/Advanced%20Machining.html
[4]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/egypt-...
[5]: http://ancientmoons.com/trees.html
[6]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/dragons-explor...
[7]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-asia/dragon-te...
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#cite_note-1
[9]: https://vixra.org/pdf/1809.0081v1.pdf
[10]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AlternateHistory/comments/nba85t/to...
[11]: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2007541-his
[12]: https://old.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/puryu1/euras...
This is partially true. However, modern anthropologists and historians are very aware of this, and spend a lot of time trying to make sure they do not push bounds of what evidence can suggest. Popular anthropologists and historians generally do not share the same care, and pseudoanthropology dives into extrapolation with abandon.
> Even when closely examining large structures like the Great Pyramid, there's evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own[3][4].
Uh... no. There is a tendency to simultaneously underestimate the precision achievable with low technology tools while overestimating the precision of important megalithic architecture. This is what produces hyperbolic claims such as "evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own."
The best theories are the ones that can marshal several different kinds of evidence, including experimental archaeology, recovery of artifacts with detailed microstructure analysis, as well as any available cultural evidence. In the case of the pyramids, how they were built is not a mystery, for we have recovered the tools used to build it from the quarries that sourced the stone, and we also have the pictures they painted to depict themselves building it. To ignore all of that evidence in favor of advanced machinery (of which no remains exist) to serve a purpose never hinted at in any literature is lunacy.
> Uncanny coincidences that do not make sense[5]
Well, the coincidence of hexagonal structure can easily be explained by there existing only three regular polygons that can tile a plane, one of which is a hexagon. Try a random Voronoi diagram (e.g., https://cfbrasz.github.io/Voronoi.html)--things tend to end up looking very hexagonal very quickly.
Of course, when you get to the claim that trees were 10 miles high...
> However, modern anthropologists and historians are very aware of this, and spend a lot of time trying to make sure they do not push bounds of what evidence can suggest. Popular anthropologists and historians generally do not share the same care
And yet, what is popular dictates what is available for research for the most part. And anyway, what I meant was that these are biases / assumptions that are considered "common sense" and / or occamian (is that a word?). One wouldn't hypothesize, for example, that the ancient egyptians used two headed camels, or cow-camel hybrids. Maybe they were killed, and nothing of them has yet been found, and our picture of the past is hence woefully incomplete / incorrect.
> Uh... no. There is a tendency to simultaneously underestimate the precision achievable with low technology tools while overestimating the precision of important megalithic architecture. This is what produces hyperbolic claims such as "evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own."
Sure. But just because someone can get a very great result with a primitive method does not mean they had required skilled labor in large numbers that could slog away for days or months on end. Trying to justify that leads to more assumptions... and in the end we end up concentrating the entire work force of the ancient world on a vanity project (apparently). Is it really so outlandish to consider that someone might have been able to make a drill, instead of slogging tens of thousands of man hours on polishing / cutting rock to exact dimensions with primitive techniques?
> Of course, when you get to the claim that trees were 10 miles high...
Well, having a tall, raised structure with almost perpendicular walls is also pretty weird. Would you rather they were ancient engineering?
Actually, it doesn't. There's a pretty big disconnect between academic research and popular publication. Partially, this is because popular outreach wins you no plaudits in the academic, but this is also partially because people like media producers are surprisingly unwilling to actually produce shows along the lines of "cool new discoveries in archaeology" and would rather produce tripe that amounts to "ALL ARCHAEOLOGISTS ARE WRONG AND THIS IS WHY IT'S REALLY ANCIENT ALIENS".
> in the end we end up concentrating the entire work force of the ancient world on a vanity project (apparently).
You do understand that Ancient Egypt had a corvée labor system (i.e., you paid your taxes in labor), and had an environment which meant that most of the inhabited lands were uninhabitable for a while each year (I think it was a month or so, but I don't know the scale of Nile floods for certain)? And we have actual letters from the Old Kingdom of Egypt that talks about managing the corvée labor?
> Is it really so outlandish to consider that someone might have been able to make a drill, instead of slogging tens of thousands of man hours on polishing / cutting rock to exact dimensions with primitive techniques?
When there is lots of evidence for the feasibility of the latter, and there is not only no evidence of the former, there is also a conspicuous lack of evidence for precursor technological steps, yes, it is outlandish. It's suggesting that comparatively advanced technology shows up out of nowhere, is used for one specific thing and nothing else, and vanishes without a trace; it should be unsurprising that proponents of these theories are also big fans of proposing that it was instead done by aliens (or Atlanteans).