Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

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In addition, a timeline of culture & technology:

    Oldowan industry - simple flaked stone tools (~2.9-1.7 million years ago)
    Acheulean industry - advanced tools like hand axes (~1.7 million - ~160,000 years ago)
    Archaic humans in Southeast Asian islands like Indonesia (~1.8-1 million years ago, dating is a bit uncertain on this one)
    First control of fire (~1 million - ~700,000 years ago)
    First archaic humans living in colder climates like Atapuerca, Spain (~800,000 years ago)
    First wooden spears denoting a change in hunting tech (~400,000 years ago)
    Widespread control of fire (~400,000 years ago)
    ==> First homo sapiens <== (~300,000 years ago)
    First neanderthals arrive in Europe (~230,000-150,000 years ago)
    First use of ochre pigment for symbolic purposes (~190,000 years ago)
    Body lice genetically diverge from head lice due to clothing (~170,000 years ago)
    Mousterian industry - points, scrapers, denticulates, notches, and awls (~300,000-40,000 years ago)
    First time eating seafood at Pinnacle Point (~150,000 years ago)
    Humans start collecting and using shell beads (~130,000 years ago)
    First heat treated material - silcrete (~110,000 years ago)
    First compound adhesive leads to tar-hafted tools (~100,000 years ago)
    First bed (~77,000 years ago)
    First bow and arrow in Sibudu (~72,000–60,000 years ago)
    Arrival in Australia (and thus first boat?) (~70,000-65,000 years ago)
    First musical instrument (flute) (~60,000 years ago)
    First burial ritual at Shanidar Cave (~60,000 years ago but controversial)
    First sewing needle (~45,000 years ago)
    Aurignacian industry - true homo sapien tools like microlithics, blades, projectile points, pressure flaking, split-base bone points (~43,000-26,000 years ago)
    Gravettian industry - Bow and arrow, harpoons, and darts come into their own (~33,000-22,000 years ago)
    Solutrean & Magdalenian industry - flint tools, cave art, etc. (~22,000-12,000 years ago)

Disclaimer: "First [...]" means "oldest surviving evidence of [...]". I tried my best to select a realistic middle ground age but each one has error bars of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and there's a lot of overlap in industries.

This list is so incomplete it's not even funny :)

A thought experiment.

It has been said that if a modern "average" human were transported back in time, it would be difficult for that person to build anything useful, because of the lack of material manufacturing (c.f. "Toaster from Scratch" and "Primitive Technology" channels) and lack of specific knowledge.

So goes my thought experiment. If I were transported 100,000 years back, I would big-scale industrialize the production of soap blocks and then build soap distribution networks over wast lands (the King of Soap). Soap is quite easy to produce with wood ash.

I would also mass-scale press-print porno comics (using wooden plate carvings).

I think these two what defines civilization and will give me a chance for not being killed as a practitioner of witchcraft.

Or you’d just cut your toe on an rock and die (with no medical care).

Soap actually increases his chance of survival in this scenario. Clean wound == less chance of infection.

Explaining what soap does and why people should value it would be the real challenge. Communication in general would need to be built from scratch. No english, no latin languages, no modern gestures like thumbs up and hand shakes, no common ground.

Depending on the era, I would bet on agriculture and fermentation as my empire-building tech. Wine first, then bread which is a little bit harder. Maybe spices also, I heard some pretty large empires were built on the power of funny flavors.

It's kind of funny that you think you would be able to produce wine 100,000 years ago. Do you know what grapes used to look like back then? Well, they were absolutely not the giant balls of sweetness we see today :D. They became that after thousands of years of selection by humans. Which first had to "invent" agriculture, which was not easy and it's still quite unclear whether the earliest civilizations that adopted it were better off until they actually became capable of creating large city-states which could then go on to dominate all their neighbours and started accumulating power.

So, 100,000 years ago you would need to convince people to join you in this crazy agriculture thing without any metal tools.... without domesticated animals either, by the way... as that would still be thousands of years in the future...

Finally, just taking a large amount of food and leaving it for a long time to ferment somewhere well protected, while everyone around is hungry, would be a huge challenge already. You might need to protect it both from people and from very large wild animals that had not gone extinct yet and would love to take that food from you (and likely use you as food also).

It doesn't need to be fine wine from the best grapes. It doesn't even need to be from grapes. The first beers were murky, slurry and not cold and people loved it.

I can convince my first followers by doing the first crops and batches myself, alone.

Usage of animals and metal tools in agriculture came much later. I don't need that to start. I just need fire and ceramics.

Of course it wouldn't be _easy_. Empires are never easy.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is the context of the original comment about soap: food tech would be more succesful than soap tech.

Elderberry would be my choice - it has medicinal properties as well as being an enjoyable flavour, it's essentially unchanged in the history that we've known of it (5000 years), so wine production techniques won't have to change much, and it's a fairly fast growing tree/shrub so building up a large orchard won't be a big deal.

Porno? Pretty sure your comics would be interpreted as "fertility symbols" by future archaeologists.

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

1. Try selling soap blocks and porno comics to an Amazon tribe or Australian native. Do they have "sell"? Do they need soap blocks? Do they need porno comics? It’s very narrow how you paint it.

2. Behavioral modernity in humans including the way we use language is thought to have emerged 70000-55000 years ago. You can’t go further back and expect to be understood.

3. Humans keep changing. The domestication of the dog ca. 28000-26000 years ago also changed the human brain by turning the dog into our wild senses.

4. Humans self-domesticated themselves the past 6000 years. Human brains show the same changes that domesticated cows have versus wild cattle species. Have you noticed that you can stay in a room with 50 strangers and not attack or sexually assault anyone? This same change led to the development of civilizations.

5. Your thought experiment only really makes sense if you go the furthest, say 12000 years back. Trade might not make sense to humans before.

6. Humans still keep changing.

7. Culture is more diverse than you think. By far more diverse. Just an example: Among human tribes across the globe 40% practice kissing, 60% never kiss. Your concepts will not translate.

> Behavioral modernity in humans including the way we use language is thought to have emerged 70000-55000 years ago.

Citation for that? There's clear evolutionary selection for language capabilities a long time before that isn't here?

I question a lot of the info in comment. Specifically the “humans domesticated themselves 6000years ago.” We had characteristics of “domesticating ourselves” long before 6000 years ago. Non-pronounced canines, reduced sexual dimorphism between males and females, are all hallmarks of a transition from a mating system that was “tournament based” (one male wins all the females) to a more pair-bonded species, although it’s a spectrum and humans have behavior related to both.

This was probably co-evolving with the cost of raising a human child. Which we didn’t just magically start doing 6000 years.

Classic example of the bullshit asymmetry principle, where it took me two paragraphs of text to reasonably dispute a one sentence off hand, inaccurate comment

Two notes on language and self-domestication: - 77kya is very late for the emergence of language (though how far it can be traced is still object of heavy debate and nuance). The tenuous consensus nowadays is that the last common ancestor with the Neanderthal/Denisovan branch had at the very least a partial capability of language. 'Behavioral modernity' is also a bit of a red herring on its own, in light of discoveries like this and how similar Neanderthals were to us in terms of archaeological record. - Re self-domestication... The concept is very messy and disputed (I've largely given up on its usefulness, in fact). But in any case 6kya is too late, simply because all modern humans are prosocial, as parent comment said.

Source: human evolution PhD, I have worked in faculty of language evolution, prosociality, genetic basis for self-domestication.

Am I right that the common ancestor of sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans is -800kya?

And what about the following strong differences between sapiens and Neanderthals/Denisovans: musical instruments, cave paintings, projectile weapons?

I found that the basis has to be there from a long time ago, and one branch makes use of it. The lungfish has limbs, but only some branches of it went terrestrial. An old human ancestor had language capabilities but only some branches used it. Dinosaurs had feathers but only some used it for gliding and flight.

Can you comment on the shrinking brain size that’s observed among humans in the past few thousand years?

Yes! ~800kya is a common estimate.

Strong differences: it's not so clear these are "strong", for a couple reasons: 1. The archaeological record has disputed some of those claims: spears are supposed to have been part of the hunting repertoire of Neanderthals [1], there are some claims regarding musical instruments (personally I'm skeptical) [3], and cave paintings [2] basically resemble what sapiens where doing about that time, which is just... not very impressive in general.

2- A much more interesting question is hiding in plain sight. It's not as much "did Neanderthals do X or Y relative to what sapiens are known to be capable of?", but rather: "given enough time, could Neanderthals or Denisovans have painted something like the Lascaux cave paintings?". Or, rather: did all these extinct humans species have the same capability for cultural ratcheting, ie transmitting and refining knowledge, that we have proven to have? Sapiens needed a lot of time to create some of our most representative "representative art", let alone other cultural innovations. On the other hand, if there were any differences in capability, what were their nature? What are the implications for language?

Re the basis: for sure! Some of the innate physical and neurological basis for language have been in place for a long time. Which pieces where co-opted, modified or appeared de novo when and for what is the interesting part. Having only the archaeological record and the DNA of these species, it's a hell of a problem.

As for the shrinking brain size: as far as I know there is some doubt about the universality or significance of this claim. It could be due to agricultural diet changes, or holocene climate fluctuations. It also coincides with population size increases, so mutations allowing more efficient brains or just regular old drift are possible. Honestly, I can't say I have a strong opinion on it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37904-w

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap7778

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divje_Babe_flute

Any thoughts on the tech & culture timeline I provided above? I'm by no means an expert - or even an armchair archaeologist for that matter - so it's difficult to keep track of the age estimates as they evolve.

The changes in the field have done nothing but accelerate and it feels like there's a new development every other week at this point.

Maybe I'd add to this the first engraving by erectus [1] (~500kya) because people tend to forget about it but I think it's quite significant. Other than that, it looks great! I also have a hard time keeping track of every new discovery, specially as I got out of academia. Amazing time to work in human evolution.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.16477

Sexual control and restriction is a pretty widespread feature of premodern cultures. I think you should stick to the soap. The porno is probably trouble.

>A Hominins timeline to help put things in perspective:

>In addition, a timeline of culture & technology:

A lot can be accomplished in a few million years that can just not be done in a few hundred thousand.

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