Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

The distance between the known examples of early art also further pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000 years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000 years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at least 100,000 years.

View on HN

… or that the ability to create art arose independently in two separated populations. As for example writing did, many millennia later.

Writing arose independently. The cognitive ability necessary to invent writing may have existing for much longer

We call that anatomically modern human or early modern human, and we have fossils going back over 300,000 years.

An infant from 300k years ago, if brought to modern times, should grow up and be capable of everything modern humans are.

Behaviourally modern is thought to be a bit more recent, isn't it... partly because of evidence like art!

Yes exactly. Though I would expect that they may be more neurotypical on average than modern humans

Out of curiosity, why do you think that? My instinct is that the selection pressure against autism would not have been meaningfully stronger back then (and might actually have been weaker, due to people living in much smaller communities).

I think people who are eager and happy to do repetitive tasks are adapted towards agriculture as opposed to hunting.

There are a lot of highly repetitive tasks in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle (e.g. gathering, making tools and clothes, tracking, plus all of the memorizing that comes with a non-written cultural tradition). I'm sure someone with a deep special interest in horse behavior would have been extremely useful for groups that subsist on the wild horses of the European tundra. Same for people with ADHD, someone who is highly motivated by novelty and prone to risk-taking should be pretty useful for finding new hunting and gathering opportunities and adapting to changing environments. You won't find out there are plump tasty BBQ birds on that island in the distance if you don't brave the journey.

In any case this isn't exactly a testable hypothesis

Not without some simulations of proto human societies with resources scattered. We are far from that level of simulation such that we could place any weight on it.

This ignores any evolution that is not present in a skeleton. So, their brains could have been very different from ours, but we have no way of knowing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocast

The cranial vault is an open space surrounded by bone. Yes, some evolutionary brain changes would reflect themselves in the endocast, but would all major brain changes do that?

> . So, their brains could have been very different from ours, but we have no way of knowing.

Great point. I like to consider birds for questions like this one.

Bird brains come in a relatively set range of sizes, but in a wider range of skills[^1], and hominids living in earlier times may have definitely needed different skills. Birds have had many millions of years to evolve. To remain flying they needed to keep their bodies small, nimble and light and they can't grow larger heads, so evolution works within those constraints. Now, there are generalists among birds, and even tool users, but who knows how long it took them to evolve their "3 nanometer process."

On the other hand, hominid's brains are very plastic, which can be due to evolution saving on "design optimization time" (and we haven't been around for as many millions of years as birds). A figurative way to explain it is this: to fish at the local pond, it's more economical to buy two general purpose computers ("have more general-purpose thinking matter") and to pay for their upkeep than to design a new computer from scratch. Later, if you decide to live from honey-farming, your computing could be used for that as well. You may need an order of magnitude or two more fish or honey to pay for your higher mental elasticity running in a sub-optimal "300 nanometer process", but it's a small price to pay for not being hostage to a fixed ecological niche.

So, I bet that humans that had made it in a short period of time from Africa to a different continent where highly adaptable, and they could probably understand most things we do today.

[^1]: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-neuroscientists-uncover-secret...

You misread what I wrote. Art can be independently invented by different groups of Homo sapiens, but the ability to create art probably arose at a particular point in our evolution.

Based on a number of lines of evidence, I would suspect nearly everything related to early art (including abstraction) was done in africa first and radiated from there (from the Out of Africa hypothesis, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...)

The history of anthropology is full of pushing events back as we improve our methods.

Wait, why couldn't the Indonesians migrate to Europe in a span of 20,000 years.

Google Maps says it takes about 5 months on foot from Borneo to Lascaux. So it could have been the same person who left at New Year's and was back home by Christmas.

Plus you'd need a boat. Borneo is about a hundred miles from the mainland.

Not sure that was the case 50ky ago. That was during a glacial period, sea level was probably 100+m below current level.

No, not in the general timeframe being discussed. Most is SEA was connected by land to continental Asia. Even North America and Asia were connected by Beringia. It’s possible you could have even walked to Australia from Asia, though I might be mistaken about that.

Sure with excellent roads and 99% of predators gone and most importantly, a reason to do it.

Predators including the human variety.

I’m not aware of studies involving radiocarbon dating of paved roads, so I can’t say conclusively, but I believe the leading hypothesis is that they didn’t exist 50,000 years ago.

some kind of exchange program for artists to residence in various places in the world, i like your hypothesis!

It's not impossible, but the mainstream theories such as 'Out of Africa' and most anthropological evidence suggests that the flow was from Africa to Indonesia and Africa to Europe, and not "back from Indonesia". But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/polynesian-ancest... as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern...

Europe is mostly believed to have been settled via Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Europe

(I am absolutely amazed by all the various humanity and technology origins. It's almost as if there is a direct path from the first person who used teeth and fingernails to pry a rock and fiber to make a spear to kill an animal and use its bones to make high quality tools for knapping stone, all the way to the lathe, which was the tool that bootstrapped the industrial revolution).

I've never heard of the idea that the lathe bootstrapped the industrial revolution. Can you say more, and any pointers to read?

There's a great Machine Thinking video about the history of the lathe that makes this point: https://youtu.be/djB9oK6pkbA

I'm not sure there's any really good book that furthers this argument (possibly The Perfectionists or One Good Turn?) but it sort of becomes obvious when you read about Maudsley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe) and Wilkinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist)...

the cannon boring machine was what enabled the efficient steam engines which unlocked large mechanical shops (along with high quality cannons), while the lathe enabled precision machine tool making. I am sure many things had to happen around the same time for the revolution but IMHO the lathe was the true linchpin

Reply on news.ycombinator.com