
Stone Age Britons imported wheat - luu
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/26/britain-history-idUSL5N0W04LC20150226
======
anarchy8
It seems like more and more we are learning just how smart we were in the deep
past

~~~
rowanseymour
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.

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

~~~
svensken
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes)

2:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middle...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middle_Ages)

3:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae)

4:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#History)

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

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markvdb
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...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NAwGLzAfyhEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)

~~~
dalke
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road)
.

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dalke
Looks like the original article was published in the most recent Science,
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/998](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...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/the-remarkable-
archaeological-underwater-discovery-that-could-open-up-a-new-chapter-in-the-
study-of-european-and-british-prehistory-10073458.html) .

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shawabawa3
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?

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dalke
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.

~~~
shawabawa3
Oops, not sure how I missed that paragraph

