12,000-year-old sequins hint at a shared culture in Indonesian islands
cosmosmagazine.com
cosmosmagazine.com
I am not at all able to say I know enough history to know if I’m way off base to ask that question. I must be glossing over some significant reasons that couldn’t have happened. It’s just weird to me.
A quote from Mad Men that helps demonstrate the sharp hockey stick of progress.
“She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She was an astronaut.”
The fundamental difference between the past civilizations and modern civilization is that all past civilizations relied primarily on human/animal power and modern society relies on non-human power. This shift occurred in the early 1800s with the development of thermodynamics and the scientific understanding of the relationship between heat, work and energy. Once we could decouple work from human population, it allowed modern civilization to do more work with less humans. Something previous civilizations never were able to achieve. A train could carry more goods across the country far faster than a thousand horses. An excavator can dig out more dirt in an hour than a thousand men. Whether trains, excavators or super computers, the work that is done is due to thermodynamics.
Imagine what an individual could achieve technologically today, if they were unable to access any materials or knowledge that was accrued over the history of our species. The result would probably be a subset of the things you describe as originating from before 250 years ago, but they would certainly not be splitting atoms or mapping the human genome.
How many geniuses did not advance science because they were ignorant of the current state of the art?
0. [In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes], Jaynes' idea was that if you went back and you looked at very early historical texts--particularly for him, the Iliad--the way that characters talk about their own minds and their own drives is extremely unusual, or you might say not at all modern. . . . But, what's actually going on, given what we know about the specialization between the hemispheres of the brain, is that essentially one side of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain is really communicating to the other. And, full human consciousness had not really been established at that time.
0. https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-wil...
I can’t remember what culture it was but there’s evidence of primitive batteries in pottery. Long before electric. That is odd no?
Jaynes suggests that a different state of mind... one of essentially hypnosis allowed civilization to expand up to a certain point. In this type of civilization... dubbed "bicameral", both the left and right hemispheres' linguistic areas were active. The right hemisphere essentially provided our "internal monologue" but in the form of auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations provided the basis for remote governance and were ultimately interpreted as gods by people, but these civilizations would fall apart beyond a certain size because the hallucinations would start to fade.
The elaborate rituals that became more elaborate as time went on was attributed to these hallucinations starting to fade as the world became more crowded with these types of civilizations. The part that gave me chills was his description of depictions of gods: up until a certain time, people were always depicted conversing with gods face to face. The gods were present, and the ruler described conversations with them. Until one point in Sumeria, when a frieze was made where god was simply a dot. Depictions of god as a dot or a symbol became more and more common, as did the deference that rulers had. Rather than conversing, they were kneeling and pleading. There were recorded complaints that the voice of the gods were fading. Eventually the voices became associated with demons. The bible records systematic purges of people who heard voices like these.
It's a pretty crazy yet weirdly hard to dismiss theory, and I wish there were more ways to find evidence to support it or debunk it.
An alternative theory for why there were so many "false starts" so to speak, is described by Joseph Tainter in "the collapse of complex societies"... which I find pretty interesting. It's much more mainstream. Basically he turns the question on its head and says "why does civilization exist at all?" That complexity takes energy. That energy wouldn't be wasted unless there were a reason... a positive return on investment in complexity. He says societies break down when the marginal returns on that investment inevitably decrease. So for instance a Native American tribe which developed around a water-sparse area and fluorished by creating cisterns and presumably trading water for other supplies developed, but as the created more cisterns, each new cistern provided less 'bang for the buck'. Eventually they hit the point where building more cisterns was actually counterproductive. The cisterns were too close together so they were cannibalizing each other's trade, and their source of water was starting to dry up, but that's what their society was organized around. Those with influence gained more wealth by creating more, even though the net benefit to the civilization was negative, so they kept doing it. You could say the society existed by virtue of a surplus-generating algorithm. But those algorithms eventually eat through the source of the surplus, and then you need something else.
It’s pretty weird to me that many folks view the people in our past as being unable to be intelligent near or on par with today’s levels. These people were not hypnotized by hallucinations, that’s saying they were not smart enough to even have a thought that they could understand it came from themselves. Yet they were smart enough to develop pulleys and create pyramids, or many other wonders of the world. Things we literally do know how they weee able to do at that time in the past. Things that none of our modern structures will outlast. Things that took understanding of complex subjects, capacity planning, raw material refining, site surveying, astronomy, physics, math, weather patterns, etc.
I wonder in 12k years if humans will look at us and say we were incapable of knowing that our thoughts were ours and lived in a hypnotic state viewing our thoughts as hallucinations. They couldn’t possibly know for one. And also, doesn’t that seem like a odd way to view people who accomplished things we still don’t fully understand?
People were not less intelligent in the past, but they knew less, and had a radically smaller fund of inventions, including mental models and practices, to draw upon. Late speculation about "hypnosis" and "hallucinations" have to be understood as analogies. We know with certainty, anyway, that notions of gods and sacrifice were invented at some particular time, and passed along. And, we know it was common in many places to perceive carved figures talking.
In 12ky, if we don't eliminate ourselves, we will certainly have many inventions that we will be unable to understand life without, and be left to try to imagine it.
I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?
In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.
Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.
As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.
Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.
We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped).
Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing.
He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature.
There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region.
His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say.
I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.
I quizzed an ancient-Greek scholar about Jaynes, and his story about evolution of Greek language. He said there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek, and Jaynes had confabulated it. Such confabulations have long been an occupational hazard of Classics scholarship. Modern statistical methods have proved necessary to banish them.
> It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that this is clear. The phenomenon he describes about writing is something one can easily experience by simply reading ancient texts. It feels different. There is no self reflection.
As for the ancient-Greek scholar you mention... I guess I'd need to see some specifics. Just hearing 2nd-hand that an anonymous scholar said he made it up isn't very compelling evidence. I'm curious about these modern statistical methods you've mentioned... how did they address Jaynes' theory?
"there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek"... I didn't get the impression of a singular phenomenon other than a lack of metaphoric references to the self in early writing. The timeline for Attic Greek seems to start at 500BC which seems to be on the end side of his hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind and 300 years after the Illiad was apparently written. Jaynes suggested it may even be older, passed down through oral history. I'm not sure that we have any evidence to truly debunk that.
Of course once the mental metaphors were established, they would quickly spread through the language, so it would be no surprise to see plenty of examples of Greek that did have more mental metaphors, especially a few hundred years later.
If you can point me to some writing from before 1500 BC or so that clearly shows a mental metaphor of a self which contains or otherwise is connected to thoughts (i.e. "the thoughts in my head"), then I'll have to take that as solid evidence against his theory.
I studied cognitive linguistics in undergrad, so this is an interesting topic to me. His theory definitely goes completely counter to what I'd previously believed which is the we've probably been far more advanced for far longer than is normally assumed. For instance the idea that the clovis people were the first in North America always seemed ridiculous to me. The thing is, even though Jaynes' idea is sort of against that general sensibility, it doesn't really directly contradict it. Anyway, I'd be curious whatever details you know about it. I thought about trying to make a serious rebuttal essay to it to find the evidence against
Still, active trade networks have meaning.
Indonesia (Makassar) also traded with aboriginal Australians but this started in earnest in the 1700s. Still, it’s reasonable to conclude the entire earth was tenuously connected (technologically and historically if not actively) already even in the 1400s aside from some very isolated islands.
But I think to claim the whole world, except islands, was connected we’d have to include Australia too. And before the 17/1800s there isn’t a lot of evidence of contact between Australia and Indonesia. According to this article, maybe contact started around 1500 or so: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9320452. Though in the same article they mention some 1000 year old Kilwan coins found off the coast of Australia so you may actually be right that we were fully connected even in 1000!
How can you determine that from a poorly attested material culture? The way it’s worded makes me deeply suspicious that it’s backporting the doctrine of Indonesian national unity into the Stone Age.
That said, it seems to me like there's increasing evidence that the Austronesian expansion was more than just random refugees getting swept to different islands by fluke storms as is sometimes implied. There is wooden pole art all around the pacific rim, DNA evidence in south america, linguistic evidence in south america, and now this. It seems reasonable to suspect that the austronesian expansion was supported by a series of large trade networks and societies that provided logistical support for the expansion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
The Younger Dryas, which occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years BP,[2] was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM),[3] which lasted from circa 27,000 to 20,000 years BP. The Younger Dryas was the last stage of the Pleistocene epoch that spanned from 2,580,000 to 11,700 years BP and it preceded the current, warmer Holocene epoch.
We know with certainty there was a comet strike, about the right time, that caused serious havoc, but evidence that it changed the climate is harder to establish. Firm evidence of sharply falling global temperature before the strike would settle the question. If the strike really did precede the cold spell, it may be hard to prove causation. It seems like the way to bet.
Another mystery is how the conflagration spared (just) bison, moose, deer, elk, pronghorn, and grizzly and brown bears.