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Comment by dillydogg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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!

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.

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.

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