

Human Ancestors Made Deadly Stone-Tipped Spears 500,000 Years Ago - tokenadult
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/11/15/human-ancestors-made-deadly-stone-tipped-spears-500000-years-ago/

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cristianpascu
I find it hard to believe that _500.000_ years ago humans were intelligent
enough to craft a weapon and only about 6000 years ago things really took off
for our civilization.

What happened to humans recently that changed things?

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tokenadult
_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.

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cristianpascu
I still get the sense that this explanation goes backwards. It's like saying
we got more intelligent because we were intelligent enough to develop writing,
or proto-writing.

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.

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criley
Similar behavior is witnessed in animals often. An animal will learn a novel
behavior -- generally some basic tool use, and then its relatives or packmates
will quickly adopt the technique. It spreads like wildfire.

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).

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dadams74
Is it just me or is HN turning into Reddit?

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tzs
I saw no cats, politics, or memes in the article. What are you talking about?

