Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
What happened to humans recently that changed things?
The submitted article was interesting to me for showing the inventive capacity of an ancestral hominin lineage, which was unknown until the studies reported in the article. Species Homo sapiens, according to the current view reported in the article, goes back the better part of 100,000 years. Most of your genes and mine have been fixed in the human lineage for at least that long.
With "recently" defined as about 6,000 years ago, by then there were several regions of the world with agriculture (different crops in different places) and there was about to be a place (Mesopotamia, specifically Sumer) with actual writing rather than just proto-writing. Both of those innovations made "civilization" (living in cities) much more feasible than before. And it does appear that living in cities prompts many other kinds of social changes. Human beings over the last several thousand years have progressed by acculturation and by writing down knowledge acquired by other individuals much more rapidly than any human lineage has ever progressed by shuffling genes.
Sounds like something that grows out of itself. Neuro-electrical reaction to light, thermic or mechanical stimuli is not intelligence. Writing, sending messages, interpreting messages is intelligence. Heck, walking in random directions is intelligence.
Obviously, since we haven't yet explained consciousness in "the brain is the mind" fashion, we're still in reverse engineering mode. Thus the explanations will sound 'just so'-ish. Nevertheless, the questions is still there: why the sudden jump in progress.
Disclaimer: I'm a creationist, but always happy to hear alternative views.
They clearly already contained the capacity to perform that behavior, they just needed to be shown that they could do it in the right context. Once they were shown once, they adopted the behavior quickly -- and even pass it on to their young.
I believe early humans developing new skills and learning was similar.
It was not that humans began speaking or writing as soon as it was biologically feasible -- rather some (long) time after feasibility was evolved, the skill was developed and then had to "go viral" and infect other humans.
How many times did it start and stop before it hit critical mass? How many tribes of humans were available for this kind of development to even take place?
Fascinating stuff, there's an enormous amount out there on this subject, and I only have a BS in Biology, so I'm no expert!
EDIT: "Why the sudden jump in progress" You may mean, "Why did human brains rapidly get larger over an evolutionarily short amount of time" -- and the answer is that there was no sudden jump, only slow increase over time (as measured in fossils).
If you're interested, Guns, Germs & Steel goes into a lot more detail.
What happened? Enough technology and development compounded to make more modern civilization possible. Various technologies may have been developed/invented in the far distant past, but were lost for various reasons.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech#When_did_speec...
It kind of makes sense that both would experience accelerating returns.
Not that population size and technological achievement are related.
Though I think the language and writing things that others have pointed out probably have more to do with it.
But when you read the thing, that seems kind of unfair. A headline similar to "Earliest Manufactured Weapons 200,000 years Older Than Previously Thought" would capture why this is actually interesting.
Here are the HN Guidelines. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Here's the relevant bit:
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)