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Comment by newfonewhodis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a scientist so I'm curious why this is interesting.

I think people who are not already familiar with the known history of the Earth find it interesting that there have been higher CO2 levels and temps than there are now.

And I agree: the history of the Earth is interesting. Which is why so many people study and work in the field of geology.

It's interesting because the whole ice cap as we know it is around 120k years ago which I don't consider the long ago on human development scale. This also appears to mean that in the past 120K there wasn't a polar ice cap. I read that as the worst case scenario we should be using for long term planning. This also may help determine how fast the ice was built and how fast it will melt.

I'm completely an armchair ponderer.

This will also assuredly fuel some interesting ideas about the origin of the Piri Reis map. A 120k year old ice sheet could mean that humans once lived on Antarctica.

It does make one wonder if any ancient sea fearing humans happened to carve a world map into a durable material such as granite which could have survived until the modern historic era. Maybe such a map, or other mythological artifact fueld the Roman idea of Terra Australis Incognita

/End rampant unsupported armchair speculation

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

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

The Polynesians used stick maps to identify currents and land masses relative positions.

With no evidence I believe navigation cues were built into the vessel. By keeping celestial bodies aligned with marks on the vessel one can achieve a seasonal calendar as well as documentation on how to modify the configuration for the next leg of the journey.

IIRC the 'maps' made of organic materials were very much a rarity slash teaching aid for the later incarnations of traditional navigation cultures of the Pacific which we have surviving material on. Mostly they used mental maps, and of course the most sensitive instruments available at the time ... at least one example of which was hanging their balls off the edge of the canoe to see if they could detect a temperature shift. A good book on the subject is We: The Navigators though it draws only from one area.

Source: Have a Pacific art collection, have been to most of the major museums on the subject, interested in sailing, authored some of the Wikipedia (featured) articles on related watercraft.

Yes, I would believe that some as fragile as the stick maps was no way to cross an ocean.

What I think is interesting is the physical representation of an oral tradition. This is different than writing as employed today.

Yep. All art is interesting for its relative flattening of multi-dimensional realities in to lesser-dimensional representations. Key concerns for the navigators were signals such as migration patterns, seaweed and other flotsam drift currents, temperatures of said currents, star positions, wave qualities, dominant wind directions, conditions and precipitation and cloud over seasons. These dynamic realities cannot be flattened in to any standard two dimensional representations even today, yet often emanate from or are disturbed by the often-tiny landmasses they would specify as origin, destination or reference points within the navigation problem. In the same way modern navigation uses multi-layered systems like bathymetric maps, local depth sensors, RADAR, GPS and navigation lights to provide orientation and safe passage amongst static and dynamic obstacles, so too the traditional navigators combined layers of sensory input considered too subtle for modern systems yet potentially equally effective in their place and season.

Probably the migratory patterns were as import at as any other reason to travel.

What I seem to be noticing is that the ancients used calculus all the time but it was the geometric tools that they used.

This gave technology a form.

Arabic numerals made tabular data more useful leading to the more number based tools.

This seems to have removed the form from technology.

Even without an ice sheet, would antarctica be hospitable? It'd still be cold and a desert I imagine, in darkness through the winter, etc.

Maybe humans become more developed because it got colder? Even on a country and global scale, the south is usually "behind" the north. It's hot, no one wants to do anything.

The American south (Arizona, Florida) were tiny and unimportant until air conditioning entered the chat. Phoenix was at 100 thousand people in the fifties.

The cold makes us think, the cold make us survive, keeps us on the edge - where we need to be. Respek the cold!

This is pretty ahistorical. Most of the world's great civilizations have been from warmer climates. Northern Europe is an exception, not the norm.

All of the world's "great" civilizations come from places with strong seasonality. The ones that didn't have winters had flooding seasons and dry seasons. Some of them had both. It also doesn't need to be bitterly cold for winter to have an effect on crops.

Sumeria and Egypt both had seasonal flooding. Italy and Greece have winters that are cold enough to disrupt agriculture. The Aztecs and Mayans had seasonal floods. The ancient Chinese empires had both. Japan has winters. The list goes on.

On the other hand there’s something to be said for a comfortable climate that leaves people with time to think when the everyday isn’t a constant complex struggle.

The Inuits of Greenland and Sami people of Lapland didn’t have Aristotle or Confucius.

That is only due to writing. I always felt that the high latitude civilizations led to technological development due to the high risk and high solitude.

Maybe there's a "sweet spot". Too warm and not enough seasonality leads cultures to not be that productive, but too cold and daily life is just too much of a struggle to invent calculus. Greenland and Lapland are probably too far north to have decent agriculture, and never had large enough populations to develop much civilization. Cultures that had people like Aristotle or Confucius had very large populations for the time.

That we know of; did they have a system of writing?

I find it hard to believe they wouldn't philosophise at all. Confucius got famous (like sun tzu et al) because his ideas were written down, published and spread.

The number of different words they have for snow and ice demonstrates a cultural understand of distinct attributes of objects. I think this would be the first step of consciousness understand one thing as distinct and separate from another.

I find it interesting because it raises questions that I don't have answers to. For example:

- What caused the temperature above Greenland to be 5°C warmer than today? Why is it cooler now compared to 120,000 years ago? What causes the interglacial periods? Is glaciation the more common state of the climate?

- The article says the ice sheet is melting at the bottom? Why? Pressure from above? Friction from movement? Heat from the Earth? Something else?

- Was the ice sheet shrinking or growing when the temperatures above Greenland were 5°C warmer than now? Does existence of the ice sheet imply that 5°C warmer for some period of time is not enough to melt the Greenland ice sheet?

- How much climate data has been lost to melting from the bottom? Is the ice sheet thickening or thinning compared 120,000 years ago? How would we know?

- How much has the Greenland land mass moved in 120,000 years due to plate tectonics? Could this have impacted the ice sheet in this short amount of time?

- Humans adapt. How did humans adapt to a climate that was warmer by up to 5°C 120,000 years ago?

- How long did the warm temperatures persist 120,000 years ago? 10,000 years? 50,000 years? Or more?

- Could a cooling climate be more worrisome to humanity than a warming one?

the drilling allows sampling of environmental components over extended period of time. this meas a historic record of, gases, ash, soot, pollen, spores, silt, insects, plant animals, metals, salts.....

Presumably because we can find well preserved organisms from that time.

It's not scientifically interesting, the glacial-interglacial cycles are pretty well established. I'm guessing they're trying to insinuate some climate change minimalism argument.

It’s interesting to know how far back in time the ice will allow them to analyze once they get to the base.

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