
Why are there so many humans? - anthrocurious
https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/human-population-evolution/
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redis_mlc
> “Then two technologies were introduced that changed these Maya’s lives and,
> ultimately, their population: a gas-powered water pump and two gas-powered
> maize grinders. [..] By 2003, women who started reproducing in the 1970s had
> eight to 12 children.”

Gotta wonder if the women thought that was progress, or not.

~~~
requin246
This is a (very recent) anachronism.

Most people in antiquity saw children as a blessing. The more children you
had, the larger your bloodline would be. In fact, being unable to have
children was a point of shame for a woman. It wasn’t until the rise of the
modern era in the west that people started wanting small families or no
children at all.

You can still see this idea of children as a blessing present in some
communities that haven’t been westernized, e.g. some Mohawk communities in
Canada.

~~~
redis_mlc
If you read the article, that group is subsistence gatherers, basically trying
to find enough calories daily to survive.

A very different situation than pondering one's bloodline.

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Iwan-Zotow
What's not to love about Bender Bending Rodriguez?

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crazygringo
The conclusion appears to be, technology frees up time so women can have more
kids, older children help raise younger ones so it scales, and grandparents
and the village help too so larger-scale cooperation scales more.

I guess I'm struggling to see what's novel about this. It seems awfully well-
established that as food supply goes up because of better technology,
populations explode (e.g. twentieth-century Africa) like happens with
literally any species anywhere.

~~~
pm90
The article's goal was to understand what set early humans apart from their
closely related species, not simply to understand why modern human populations
have exploded in the last couple of centuries. The answer to that seems to be
that inter-generational co-operation in early human societies are what set
them apart, enabled specialization and allowed the development of technology
that frees up time, which led to more pop, and so on.

Perhaps these facts are not novel? I'm not sure how much of this is generally
understood. Personally it seemed an interesting read. My education consisted
of listing eras of human evolution (hunter gatherer, farmer, stone age etc),
without much info on what human society looked like in the hunter gatherer
stage. So this was novel to me at least.

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ericmcer
Are we entering a new phase in human existence? The close knit tribe that
thrived with cooperation is definitely in its death throes right now, at least
in the developed world. Is it possible for us to cooperate on a global scale
though, or are we still too primitive, our consciousness too weak to
comprehend our place in such a massive system.

~~~
chadcmulligan
> The close knit tribe that thrived with cooperation is definitely in its
> death throes right now

Is it? I think there are a lot of social systems that are being tested at the
moment, some are failing. There are many developed countries that are
improving their cooperation in the current crisis - I'm in one - Australia,
there are others that have seemed to come together, and others that have
failed abysmally. No doubt the ones that have had trouble will examine and
regroup, maybe some won't. I can imagine if you're in a country with a
thousand deaths a day, things don't look good.

~~~
adventured
> I can imagine if you're in a country with a thousand deaths a day, things
> don't look good.

You're obviously referring to the US during the pandemic of 1968-1969, which -
as everyone knows - ended the United States forever, because things were so
bad in tandem with the severe civil chaos occurring at the time (which was
worse than anything going on now in multiple ways). The US never recovered;
its superpower status, its wealth and power all vanished from there. Oh wait,
that didn't happen at all.

I'm in the US, the future looks great, if you can see beyond the tip of your
nose. Historically the US always improves thanks to the types of challenges
that are going on now, rather than getting worse. In my short lifetime I've
lived through several occasions of: 'things are so bad, this is the end of the
US' type over-drama (which is farcical).

The US is radically more resilient than people outside of the US will ever
understand. It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and
erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so
embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.

What surprises me is observing the foreign/outside estimation of what it takes
to essentially break a nation. I'm surprised the rest of the world is so
fragile, they're mentally projecting their own low breaking points onto the US
in the criticism.

~~~
pm90
I would ask that you reconsider your worldview. Its quite natural to speculate
on the demise of the Superpower, because by its nature it is the Country that
gets a lot of attention. This doesn't mean that a majority of the non-US
peoples are actively rooting for its demise (maybe they are? Its an assertion
that needs to be validated, perhaps with polls).

> It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion,
> going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so
> embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.

History has shown us that nearly every civilization that flourished and
prospered also managed to vanish over a really short period of time. Societies
are a lot more fragile than you would believe. American success is not based
on some jingoistic manifest destiny; it is a country that has managed to get
its fundamentals right. However, even the best prepared civilization can
collapse in short order; its happened before, and there is no reason to
believe it won't happen again.

~~~
chadcmulligan
I look back to the 50's in the US (and most western countries I believe) - a
time when science and education were respected and educating and housing the
citizenry was the goal. As a result of this and other events the booms of the
70's occurred.

There seems to be a reversal of this - science is actively disregarded by a
large part of the population, education is not respected, a large and growing
part of the population is disenfranchised and so on. These are not good
portents imho.

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mindfulhack
I know this is off topic, but: There are too many of us. If we can't override
our survival instinct to multiply (and consume) uncontrollably, then we are at
risk of making ourselves extinct. Then there will be none of us.

~~~
rossnordby
Given the timescales that humans operate on, it would be incredibly strange
for us to reproduce into extinction. As far as direct effects, an unmitigated
exponential growth trend would eventually result in widespread famine and
other resource restrictions leading to a population-limiting amount of death.
Not extinction, but not much fun either.

Long term accumulating issues that become unrecoverable past a tipping point
could be a source of extinction (e.g. extreme worst case climate change).
Here, yes, exponential growth _could_ hasten extinction in a world where
people weren't trying to stop the catastrophe, but...

1\. Empirically, we're not on an exponential curve or anything close to it.
Many developed countries would be in population decline without immigration.

2\. Generally, the best solution to problems of efficiency or long term
threats is _improved technology_ , not reducing population. In the concrete
case of climate change, cutting emissions per capita by >50% is both
achievable and clearly superior to the Thanos approach.

3\. More people can produce a more interesting universe to live in. Imagine a
solar system colonized with 10 trillion humans: provided we build the
requisite efficient infrastructure to unfetter human creativity, we would have
the capacity to produce over a thousand times as many isekai animes.

~~~
mindfulhack
I appreciate your immaculate grammar. :) There's not many people - at least
outside HN - who write Internet comments of such good writing quality. From
one technical writer to possibly another, thanks. :)

And I appreciate your optimism. Not sure if it's been done much, but more
honest analysis - that isn't biased by human emotions like hope of survival -
on the history of the natural world and all evolution across all organisms
from the beginning until now, analysing which behaviours result in which
outcomes in terms of species extinction and resources sustainability, would be
appreciated. No one wants to hear bad news, but we have to take its
possibility seriously.

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k__
I always like to learn about human skills that aren't obvious and that other
animals, especially other great apes, lack

For example

Humans can throw good.

Humans can run very long.

Humans won't usually kill each other when put together in great masses.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
The first one is an attribute of homo sapiens, but not other, extinct, humans
like neanderthal. Spearthrowing appears to be an adaptation that is unique to
our kind of human. Sportsball fans everywhere rejoice!

~~~
davidstone
Do you have a source for this claim? It is contradicted by
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347593/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347593/)

"Evidence-based debates around the origins of thrusting and throwing spear use
in human evolution have typically focused on hominin skeletal evidence.
Proposals that features of the upper limbs of different species of Homo
indicate that throwing only comes into play with H. sapiens23,35 are hampered
by multiple issues. These include small sample sizes, human variation in
populations36, evidence that humeral robusticity and shape may not correlate
with strains in weapon use37, and a lack of clarity whether any single
activity contributes to or offsets bone remodeling or robusticity36,38,39.
Others argue for an earlier emergence of throwing, showing that features
necessary for accurate and powerful throwing are evidenced in H. erectus
fossils40–42. A recent find of an early Neanderthal dating to MIS 7 from
Tourville-la-Rivière shows skeletal trauma consistent with repeated throwing,
supporting the hypothesis that they were capable and frequent throwers43."

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Interesting, I don't have a specific source as I have read about it for years
and it was definitely discussed in my wife's physical anthro courses in her
recently completely anthro degree.

And I seem to remember this in a display the Museum of Natural History in NY.
Neanderthal using speers at close range, but not able to throw an atlatl or
speer.

Sounds like people (and I) have been wrong!

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yesenadam
Arghh it's that site with the "Yes I love humans" / "No I'm not human" popup
obscuring the screen after a few seconds again. It's kind of cute, but my
natural response to that is back button. I don't know what it's trying to say.
Can't be just me it puts off like that. What a shame, it seemed like a
fascinating article.

~~~
ourmandave
_...but my natural response to that is back button._

Lead web dev: <examining logs> "We need to hijack the back button."

~~~
throwaway894345
My favorite is when they just dump the URL to the history endlessly so you can
never go far enough back. I see this on a surprising number of otherwise
reputable sites, and then I immediately leave the site and set my browser to
blacklist it.

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reedwolf
I believe all genetically possible humans should be brought into existence.

If we imagine the set of all genetic combinations that result in something
that could be conceivably thought of as “human,” only an infinitesimal
fraction of humans will ever be born through traditional sexual recombination.
To be born is to win a lottery with astronomically long odds.

As biotechnology advances, we will be able to conceive and grow humans using
completely artificial means (eg artificial wombs). Do we, the relatively tiny
population of humans who have had the luck to be born, have a duty to the much
more vast population of “genetically possible humans” to bring them into
existence?

I think we do if we ever reach a post-scarcity society.

Three obvious problems: genetic mutations that would make a life unbearable,
the phenomenon of twins, and the astronomical number of resulting humans.

I’m sure we’ll be able to identify extremely negative mutations and either fix
them or abandon those genomes. The issue of twins means we’re not generating
every possible human mind, but creating a reasonable sampling of that space
(we observe twins have very similar life outcomes). To the last problem, I
have no solution, I’m just assuming the Universe is spatially infinite with an
even distribution of matter and energy.

BTW, it might be simpler to just simulate these humans, but I’m still
extremely uncertain as to what extent a human in a computer = a human in meat-
space.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Don't believe that makes sense. Being human is defined by existing humans.
Change the genes too much, it non-human. Not sure how to draw a line.

~~~
Supermancho
> Being human is defined by existing humans.

That's a philosophy, not a fact. Individuals and organizations define things
by all sorts of criteria. eg temporally, consensus and differentiation are
just a few. It's not as simple as "we all agree this zebra is a human".

~~~
klmadfejno
And yet if your philosophy contends that zebras are humans you're either nuts
or are getting off on an argument of semantics that is clearly adjacent to the
issue everyone is trying discuss.

~~~
AstralStorm
So frogs are people too? Bah.

Why are people so hung up on definition of human rather than more critical
things we don't understand, such as consciousness and intelligence?

Perhaps they're afraid to be put in the non-human box, and non-human is to be
removed or exploited? (Also, inhumane. For once properly built word.)

History has shown repeatedly narrow definitions of humanity in action. It ends
in a bloodbath of some kind.

