
The Modern Mind May Be 100k Years Old (2016) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-modern-mind-may-be-100000-years-old
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lxe
If humans has the same capacity for thought 100,000 years go as they have now,
why didn't "modern civilization" develop earlier? Or rather, why didn't the
catalysts for civilization: agriculture, language, writing, etc... happen
earlier?

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minikites
Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early
agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than contemporary
hunter gatherers. My hunch is that we spend a lot of time at local maximums
until an outside force motivates us to go through a period of being worse off
before becoming better off (after the negatives have been addressed and the
positives refined).

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BurningFrog
> _Agriculture is a bad deal compared to hunting and gathering. Early
> agricultural societies had worse health and had harder lives than
> contemporary hunter gatherers._

I keep hearing this, and it's probably true in some sense.

But agriculture is also an _incredibly_ good deal, in that it now supports
7000 million human lives. H&G only reached about 50 million.

So it becomes a philosophical question: Is it better to have a few happy
people alive or a huge population of less happy ones?

I'm reminded of the old "explorer's fallacy", where you encounter a tribe in
the jungle and marvel at how healthy everyone is. Not realizing that the sick
and infirm aren't allowed to live there.

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chrisco255
I don't know if it's a question of happiness, but instead it was probably one
of necessity. H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly
dispersed in nature. Agriculture gave man the ability to manifest abundance
without necessarily depending on nature to provide.

I think there are many studies on the overall health of hunter-gatherers as a
result of diet and exercise and leisure time as demanded by the lifestyle. In
early agricultural societies you have to work harder and longer and you're
forced to eat a lot of bread, potatoes and corn and other low quality foods.

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BurningFrog
Of course, you can only study the diets of the living.

> _H-G numbers were kept in check by available resources randomly dispersed in
> nature._

But... doesn't "numbers were kept in check" mean "surplus people starved to
death"?

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chrisco255
Yes, but that tended to happen in linear fashion. Whereas, after agriculture,
growth could occur exponentially and then when a major multi-year drought
would hit, you'd have huge devastating loss of life. The deaths of some H-G
humans is not much different than the limits of growth modern predators hit
today. Hunter-gatherer humans could also keep their numbers in check by
breastfeeding longer (sometimes until their children were as old as 5), since
breastfeeding delays ovulation. Agricultural societies, meanwhile, developed
lactose tolerance for cow's milk, and could use that as a supplement for child
nutrition. And women would spend more of their time on the work necessary to
run a farm or home, which is more labor intensive than what nomadic H-G tribes
did.

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allovernow
Taboo observation: the human population has experienced multiple divergent
migrations starting potentially as early as 300k years ago[1].

This would have significant implications for potentially different cognition
among different human subgroups. Especially those that have lived in isolation
for 10s-100s of thousands of years until recent history with modernized travel
and interconnectivity.

This may not be a pleasant realization, but it cannot be overlooked in the
quest to understand sociological dynamics.

1.[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_mod...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans)

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jonmc12
Recent theories around Prefrontal Synthesis are useful to consider with regard
to the evolution of the "modern mind". ".. the existence of a strong critical
period for PFS acquisition creates an evolutionary barrier for behavioral
modernity"[1]. In short, the PFS acquisition theory explains functionality of
recursive language and imagination. These adaptations are thought to occur
about 70k years ago.

[1]
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v8.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v8.full),
2019

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nivethan
I remember reading about this on reddit and how the idea that there was an
explosion of thought 50kya years ago is misleading. This seems to support that
idea, I wonder why it hasn't made it's way into the public consciousness yet.

The comment in question:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/4ehwdp/wou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/4ehwdp/would_an_anatomically_modern_human_newborn_from/d24e5ln/?st=jlcaqf3z&sh=f368960c)

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luxuryballs
It seems odd to me that the ability of us to properly date these things isn’t
questioned more.

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simonh
Dating like any science has to be based on evidence. As we gather more
evidence and learn to identify it, we get better dates.

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reggieband
I sometimes like to go down the rabbit hole of Atlantis and related
conspiracies. I recall a time in my life those ideas seemed so laughable that
they were completely pointless. I blame Joe Rogan and his podcasts with Graham
Hancock for forcing me to consider ideas of ancient civilizations seriously.
Not that I consider Graham Hancock's specific ideas to be serious. But it did
force me to challenge my own preconceptions of what is possible.

I do recall, on hacker news I believe, an article posted based on a study by
NASA scientists that tried to calculate the likelihood of finding evidence for
civilizations 10 thousand years, 100 thousand years or older. What is shocking
is how quickly any remnants of an advanced civilization could deteriorate.
IIRC, the conclusion of the study was that the chance of us finding any
evidence of civilizations that old were extremely small.

The idea that there was an ancient civilization over 10 thousand years ago is
entirely plausible to me. Massive geological events (or even astrological ones
like asteroid impacts) could have altered entire continents. Who knows what
evidence is at the bottom of the Pacific ocean that we cannot access. Or what
evidence has been forced under tectonic plates through subduction.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far none
of the presented evidence is extraordinary (IMO). But our fixed notion that
civilization sprang up nearly fully formed 10 thousand years ago doesn't seem
as clear to me as it once did.

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WalterBright
Zero evidence of things like refined metals or synthetic materials in the
geologic record makes the odds of an advanced ancient civilization seem highly
improbable.

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reggieband
Yes, I've heard of refined glass as being one of the indicators. However,
pretty advanced technologies like pottery would not have made it.

I can't be sure this [1] is the original article I was remembering but it
might be an interesting read anyways. I am sure the study authors approach the
subject with far greater care than I could.

1\. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-
industri...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-
prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/)

~~~
WalterBright
I don't agree that pottery is "pretty advanced". It's just fire applied to
clay.

Concrete, on the other hand, is advanced.

The novel "The Hab Theory" is a good story about the discovery of prehistoric
civilizations.

