Stone Age Britons imported wheat | Hacker News Reader

Stone Age Britons imported wheat

reuters.com

41 pointsluu29 comments

It seems like more and more we are learning just how smart we were in the deep past

I got that memo the first time I saw the pyramids. The engineers were technologically inferior, but new their craft and were smart.

Here goes our technofetishistic era.

And knew their craft to the extent that is rarely seen today. When you only have few poor tools with which you work your whole life, and want to do big things, you end up knowing those tools as well as methods from inside out. Depth vs. breadth.

It was probably also rare to see it back them. We have examples of what, a few dozen of those super engineers in a timespan of several centuries.

You need to match a genius with resources. And ... with the amount of bloodshed - we don't know what is lost.

Friend recently shared a short story with me, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN - Harry Turtledove[1] and what you said reminded me of it.

[1]: http://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK

I read that story, it's amazing; one of my favourite short stories ever.

Which reminded me of another related story, Superiority, by Arthur C. Clarke[0]. From what I heard, it's actually a required reading at Westpoint.

[0] - http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

I've read a couple of good books recently (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari being my favourite) which make a convincing case for human evolution having mostly finished sometime around 100,000 - 50,000BCE when we homo sapiens started migrating out of Africa. It's pretty amazing to think that there were human beings walking around back then who were at least as mentally developed, if not more, than we are today.

What makes you think they might have been more mentally developed?

Because of modern amenities, people that would have died off due to reasons of low intellect now survive.

I was watching Star Trek TOS last night, and noticed the vocabulary of the actors is significantly larger than current crop of TV shows. I'd wager that people are getting dumber, and the ad/television networks are catering to this absence of education.

I wonder how I would go about proving that? Perhaps find a script archive and process for average age of learning words, and average each year up?

Most people who died in childhood in the past died because of diseases that had absolutely nothing to do with intellect - typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diptheria etc.

Surely in an age of widespread literacy and limited manual labour, those with low intellect today are faced with a far harder struggle than those in the past. Only a few hundred years ago the vast majority of humans were engaged in farming and manual labour - not particularly demanding of intelligence.

Even if your theory (that those of low intellect used to die off at a far greater rate than those of high intellect) had any basis in fact, it strikes me as remarkable that it would take less than 50 years (perhaps 2 generations) for the effect to be so pronounced that television producers were forced to reduce script vocabulary. You'd think that a crisis of this magnitude would at least be noticed.

Perhaps (and I only guess here) the reason the lexicon of television might have fallen is less to do with a reduction of the audience's intelligence and more to do with the slow realisation of television producers that simpler, less wordy television shows have greater mass appeal.

Television used to be a near-monopoly serving the establishment. It's now incredibly competitive driven entirely by ratings.

Evolution works over periods far, far greater than single generations. If you're proposing that society has seen a significant fall in average vocabulary over a generation, rather than simply blaming people getting "dumber", perhaps you should look at how your education system is failing.

We didn't get our intellect from our farming ancestors 10,000 years ago - but our hunter gatherer ancestors 100,000 years ago. For them, daily survival required a high level of intelligence.

In Sapiens, Harari argues that the neolithic agricultural revolution (~12,000 BCE) which caused people to settle down into villages made death by disease more common than it had been for our hunter gatherer ancestors.

That said am also doubtful that we've got significantly dumber since the advent of television.

This is terribly subjective, but I've always had the impression that the Ancient Greeks had a much higher instance of over-the-top brilliant minds than any of our modern societies could boast (controlling for population and living conditions, etc).

Around 200 BC, Eratosthenes [1] (a regular young Greek poet) calculated the circumference of the Earth just by measuring shadow lengths at high noon, and his guess was pretty much spot on (plus he figured out how far the Moon and the Sun are from the Earth, also very accurately), whereas Robert Hooke complained that too many people believed in a flat Earth in the 1600's [2]. Eratosthenes also invented Geography. Literally.

Pythagoras (~500BC) was a crazy smart guy, too. And then there was Hannibal, who used some insanely clever tactics to defeat a massive Roman army in what's considered the most decisive military victory in history (Hannibal lost 6,000 men, the Romans lost 60,000) (~216BC). [3]

My other favorite instance of mind-blowing genius is the Roman poet Lucretius writing about the time he stared at some dust floating around in a sun beam and deduced the notion of Brownian Motion, where the movement of atoms bouncing off each other on an invisibly small level "gradually emerges to the level of our senses... as bodies in motion." [4]

We have a whole lot of very smart people doing awesome things today, but when you control for population sizes, available knowledge, and living conditions, etc, the intellect of historical populations seems a lot more impressive than ours today.

-----

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middle...

3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae

4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#History

Pardon me, but where can I find your reading list?

Well the argument that Harari and others have made is that our hunter gatherers ancestors on the plains of East Africa, actually had more need for mental capacity than we do today. You had to have your wits about you to not end up as lion's lunch and live long enough to pass on your genes.

Also our brains may have been shrinking a little over the last ~30,000 years [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Evolution [1]

I had this same insight a few years ago. That human beings with the exactly same brain capacity than ours existed 100,000 years ago. And we normally think about knowledge and realizations and things happening from 10,000 years ago at the most.

This openned my mind to realise the importance of some things we take for granted: learning tools and institutions, diversity (in depth and breadth), register of history and culture.

It's mind blowing and tragic at the same time. We'll only ever get tiny and blurred glimpses of the stories of those people and tribes that walked the earth for all those millennia. It's so easy then to forget that they had hopes and dreams just like us.

Contrast that to people born in this century whose every move from the day they were born is documented online.

I've been meaning to read this www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Big-History-From-the-Big-Bang-to-the-Present but then found your comment for http://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-A-Brief-History-Humankind/prod... and now after reading the 1-star reviews from both, I want neither.

Suggestions for a purely subjective read?

Good luck on your quest for a "purely subjective read". Every good book out there has its critics. I suggest you read this one and make up your own mind.

Given the surprise a lot of people have learning their were pre-columbian trade routes from the Arctic to South America, I am not sure we really teach much in the way of history.

There was regular trade between Australia and Indonesia from the 1500's onwards, well before the Europeans turned up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makassan_contact_with_Australia

Much more recently, from around 1600 BCE, amber from the Baltic coast seems to have found its way into Egypt.

http://books.google.com/books?id=NAwGLzAfyhEC&printsec=front...

That link gives a 404 page.

Another example, from the article: "there has been other signs of contacts, including bones of domesticated pigs in Germany in Stone Age hunter-gatherer settlements. "There are trade networks that pre-date agriculture,""

Regarding the amber trade, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road .

Looks like the original article was published in the most recent Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/998 , so behind a paywall but available from my local library.

There are more details in the review at The Independent . http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-remarkab... .

It seems this is all based on a finding of "traces of wheat DNA"

Does that really suggest farming or trade? Couldn't it have just been wild wheat?

Quoting from the article:

> The scientists also found DNA of oak, poplar and beech and of dogs or wolves, deer, grouse and auroch, a type of cow. There was no trace of wheat pollen in the samples, indicating that it was not grown locally.

Oops, not sure how I missed that paragraph

Reply on news.ycombinator.com