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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Relevant only by virtue of also being about historical children’s drawings, but it reminds of another example of a child’s drawings preserved for us to see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim

> … Onfim, was a boy who lived in Novgorod (now Veliky Novgorod, Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark, which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.

I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.

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Author of the original Appendix article here (the one about Darwin's kids) - I think it got on HN today because I linked to while discussing Onfim here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...

Hi Ben! I'll email you a repost invite for the Onfim article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705174) - if you wait a week or so and then use it, the repost will go in the second-chance pool.

The reason for waiting is to give the hivemind cache time to clear. Normally we'd re-up the existing post, but we don't want two overly similar threads on the frontpage within a short time period.

2014! Amazing.

That's one of the most endearing article I have read in a long time. Thanks for the joy.

> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us.

I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.

For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.

It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.

They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.

Although the laborers working on pyramids and tombs were initially mostly corvee labor, they did evolve into a more specialized and privileged class of artisans over the (very long) course of Egyptian history. The first recorded labor strike in history occurred in a village of such artisans over lack of pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Medina_strikes

Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.

For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.

Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.

It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.

We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.

We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.

Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.

> smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning

This is the nub of it - we're better at one very particular thing. I think I'm gonna get crucified if I really go into arguing against abstract reasoning as the baseline for understanding the world on this site, but without trying to defend that particular assertion I'd just make a note to say that what IQ tests are testing is a very specific type of thinking and not actually generalized intelligence, which is a very broad topic.

What kind of question would you put on an iq test to make it a better measurement of generalized intelligence?

So, this isn't my area of expertise, but - I score very high on abstract reasoning tests, and I've been lucky enough to be around a bunch of people who are adept at things that at best require a whole lot more effort on my part to grok. I've got friends who can pick up a new language in a matter of months. I've got friends who can hear a song, know what keys it's in, improvise to it, extend it, and build complementary riffs to it on almost anything that makes a sound with more than one tone. I've got friends who can go into a room of children and have them all quiet and paying rapt attention in minutes. I've got friends who could sell an anchor to a drowning man, or have a dude in full biker gear and tattoos discussing their relationship with their mother and their childhood home. I've got friends who can read a book a day and tell you anything you ask about any of them and how they relate to each other. I've got friends who are almost telepathic in their ability to read and react to animals. I've got friends whose kinesthetic sense, ability to move their bodies, and ability to learn new physical movements is almost uncanny. I've got friends who can create absolutely stunning works of art that capture a feeling or a moment without any concrete imagery.

I am, and I say this without ego, a very smart person, and there are situations I absolutely excel - I can synthesize new information very quickly, I can draw correlations and relationships and principles from sparse data, I recognize patterns and build and dissect systems easily. Abstract reasoning is my wheelhouse, but I cannot do the things my friends can do with the ease they do them - I can get there eventually, in the same way that they can get to where I am eventually, but the things they do very clearly require a different type of intelligence than my variety.

The Flynn effect is about the change in measured intelligence through the 20th century. It tells us precisely nothing about the difference in intelligence between the 13th century and today, let alone going back before the Bronze Age Collapse or agriculture.

A large part of the Flynn effect may be due to reductions in environmental pollutants, which would mean it would be a reversal of the effect of the industrial revolution. Or it may have been due to people being much more used to taking tests. Or it may be due to nutrition. It is unlikely to be due to modern education forcing people to "learn to reason abstractly from an early age" because schools don't require students to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.

I think this is compounded by the correlation of beliefs between modern cranks who reject their education and believe what science now knows to be absurdities like "the Earth is flat" or "carrying this crystal pendant will please the gods and protect you from getting sick" with smart ancient people who believed the Earth is flat or crystal pendants will please the gods and prevent you from getting sick.

Yes, perhaps both Homer (the author of the world-famous literary classic the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a hypothetical modern Homer (d'oh!) believed in a flat Earth. The modern Homer failed to understand or rejected the education he was offered, while a hypothetical modern observer, who feels more intelligent than the flat-earther, understood and accepted it. But that does not mean that the ancient Homer was of similar intelligence!

I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."

Thank you for this; surprised I haven't heard much about him prior, since I've been digging into political economy lately.

Specifically, his notes on consumption / full employment are refreshing - it never sits right with me that the goal of economic policy at a high level is so often at odds with doing things in a "smart" way (measuring projects in jobs created, for example).

The difference between us and them is the accumulated knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until someone told us.

The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because

1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and

2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.

Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal

My favorite part of wikipedia's article on Onfim is this absurdly understated sentence:

> One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, with Onfim's name written next to him, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance, with scholars speculating that Onfim pictured himself as the knight.

I guess we'll never truly be able to know what Onfim was thinking when he drew a knight named "Onfim" stabbing an enemy with a lance from horseback. The past is a foreign country, and the mind of a child can't be understood anyway.

The article suggests it's his teacher, and I'm inclined to believe this. Pretty consistent with the idea of a kid who doesn't want to do homework, and scorns the source of all homework (the teacher)

It's amazing to think about. I'm sure you could take one of more ancient human babies, teleport them to the present day, and they would be able to grow up like any other kid. It's remarkable. Part of our human-ness is our robust written and oral histories.

You could probably go tens of thousands of years back and have this still be the case.

Except for their immune systems or lactose tolerance.

65% of humans have lactose intolerance, so depending on where exactly you teleport them to it might be a completely normal thing. I'd imagine the immune system will have the capacity to develop in the same way too, so really it should work out fine.

As an immunologist, I see no reason why the newborn from tens of thousands of years ago wouldn't be perfectly suited for the modern world.

Lactose tolerance in Europeans likely arose with early PIE groups as they began domesticating horses and oxen. Perhaps several time independently in different groups.

Lactose tolerance in populations is linked with pastoralism, and if I am remembering correctly colder climates as well.

Most humans today are not lactose tolerant as adults - it’s actually the exception.

On the flip side, in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them (unlike many of us today).

Perhaps that's a way in which we're less educated than those who came before us

Some people living in the 13th-14th century in Europe considered the people who lived prior to the fall of the Roman Empire to be more civilised and advanced, if not actually more intelligent than they were. From their perspective the world had gone through a a dark age of ignorance and sin, and was only starting to recover.

It wasn't until much later, in the 15th and 16th century onwards, that people began to think that they were more advanced and accomplished than the ancient Greeks and Romans.

>in the year 1200 the average person would likely not have considered the people living 800 years before them to be all that different from them

How do you know this?

And does the average person today really think someone living in the year 1200 to be all that different from them living in 2025? If so, in what way does this person think people 800 years ago are different from us? (I'm asking because I don't share your assumptions if this hypothetical person were to think on this matter for more than 5 seconds)

Seconded!

We have some pretty interesting family records, and if I look back 200 and 500 (and sometimes longer..) years ago, the information we have about family members feels remarkably current. There were divorces, economic and political challenges, times of prosperity and times of struggle. Property changed hands, taxes were levied, sometimes family members quarreled and sometimes they started new ventures together. The particular skills one might need in any one era or the social and political environment might change, but the human condition is remarkably common throughout the ages.

If you had a time machine and went back 10,000 years and adopted a baby from then, no one but geneticists would ever know.

Maybe even 100,000.

I think it is pretty controversial and surprising. As Wikipedia puts it:

"Debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were behaviorally modern as well."

Anatomically modern humans emerged 300,000 years ago but behaviourally modern humans only date back to 60,000-150,000 years ago.

> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial or surprising, but it’s easy to forget that people who came long before us were really no different from us (or put differently, were no different than them), and it helps to better understand history if you think of them that way.

In many ways no different to us, in other ways, knowledge, cultural norms, gender roles, morality, etc they are very different to us.

We're very tribal and very hostile to people outside of our tribe, and what we consider our tribe has slowly expanded over time.

Thankfully today we mostly don't form up into raiding parties to go kill, rape, and enslave people in the neighboring suburb - but that would have been historically a very normal and acceptable thing to do.

It's curious to consider that Onfim probably grew up, toiled, had a family, and died with an entire life behind him... yet we still think of him as "a boy who lived in Novgorod" because the only evidence of his existence is this set of random childhood scribbles.

> you’d find they’re just like us.

Yep, and it's good to remember that "us" is still a pretty diverse bunch.

this is insane. 6 year olds 800 years ago went to school ?

It's not clear how old he was.

Well, probably not most children. I don’t really know anything about that particular region at that particular time, but based on history generally, literacy was - until recently - often reserved for higher social classes.

From the wiki article:

> Scholars believe that the Novgorod Republic had an unusually high level of literacy for the time, with literacy apparently widespread throughout different classes and among both sexes.

I read that too and I was surprised, but then the first thing that popped into my mind was that this is probably a case of survivorship bias

Novgorod was the only major East Slavic settlement to avoid destruction or subjugation by the Golden Horde, so I think it is akin to a boy from a well-to-do family in medieval Avignon or Strasbourg learning to read and write. Meaning, not just any city or any family in the mid/late 13th century had the need or means for such schooling, but as pointed out in this thread it was more likely in Novgorod.

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