Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced.

We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.

What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.

This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer.

In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.

Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.

Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.

For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools.

Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.

By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.

These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.

Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.

I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.

The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.

Reminds of this awesome talk about technology collapse, has some petty cool historical examples too - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Yeah, whenever I see pre-modern tools, clothing, shelter, I always think it's amazing and wonder at how much they must know to make it all work.

Like bronze: alloy copper & tin together, when tin only came from a very few places on earth.

Linen is my usual example of cultural encoding of what we now see as early tech. Making linen from flax is complicated.

https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made

Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it.

Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down.

Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/

Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe...

There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them:

https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf

https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...

I read only Grimm's story, and there's no linenmaking in it?

Take, for example, Clovis points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_point). There is an amazing amount of skill in those relatively utilitarian tools.

How did they cut their nails, I always wonder.

Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.

Bite them, tear them or wear them down with manual tasks I imagine.

Flint could make a blade sharp enough to carefully carve your nails back if you really wanted

If you're careful you can bite a spot and then use a different nail to break the longer part without much hassle It's a lot less destructive to the teeth and has the bonus of smoothing the nail

Rough stones are easy enough to find if they needed to file them but if you've ever seen the hands of someone who does a variety of hard manual work every day it's more likely their nails were just worn and broken naturally with the odd bit chewed off.

> How did they cut their nails

They didn't. Probably like felids don't cut their claws.

No need to cut them if you occasionally idly rub a rough rock against them, filing them down before they can get long.

I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege?

Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.

I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people.

Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.

The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.

> The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.

Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory.

Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.

My guess would be that most of them were. Not just by the tribe for the anti-social aspect, but by its leader for the threat to his power.

> Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.

I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.

Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.

But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.

Envy has its evolutionary roots in something

We definitely have examples of people just flat out rejecting things because they are new. Even small improvements. I think there is room in history for both leaders who are open to invention as long as it doesn't appear destabilizing and leaders who reject almost any change as a potential threat to the fundamental structure of society.

Cultural inertia: same reason society moves slowly today even when a small group of people are convinced they have a much better way. When change requires the whole group, the change has to be clearly advantageous (high reward, low risk, or both). That's because there is a material and information overhead to change, with bigger changes being more costly.

It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.

The same way we would treat someone today who wants to build an engine powered by magnets, gravity or fueled by water. Someone who wants to map personality traits onto the position of the celestial bodies. Someone who wants to build a device to talk with people in the after life. Someone who wants to use remote viewing or channeling to discover useful things. etc etc

It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.

This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.

Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.

And most importantly: who controlled that new invention.

Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.

Or her position.

For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".

Great points. I also wonder how long it will take for us to innovate to an equivalent level of sustainability and stability.

Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.

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