The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions. Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
I was really interested in seeing what's the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime!
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
Interesting, I've never thought about it in terms of % of years lived and when. I recently saw that 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Wild. And I agree that it really does show the dominance of recent history.
Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).
Infant mortality is also impacted by decisions of thresholds when to try to save a life. The US for example considers 24 weeks the cutoff, much earlier than other countries, which is why the infant mortality is higher - the % of babies who normally make it after being born at 24 weeks is about 50%. Same thing happens with cancer rescue statistics - the doctors who are considered best, risk doing invasive action when others would not, thus saving normally un-saveable people, and registering higher mortality than others who wouldn’t try. Thus anywhere mortality has a high % you have to also account for total # of cases and % of recovery from severe cases.
Thanks for sharing, I had no idea about this. I have seen infant mortality numbers tossed out as evidence the US sucks and never realized the numbers were not so simply comparable between countries. I shouldn’t be surprised :/
In terms of comparing how countries do at the basics it would probably make sense to only compare the infant mortality for babies that were carried to the full term, or within a few days at least. I'm not sure if there's global data on that specifically, but it would be interesting to see and compare.
The gestation age threshold doesn't really matter across Europe, but a birthweight threshold does somewhat. [1,2] The US doesn't look as bad for infant mortality when only comparing only births at 28 weeks or later, 2nd to last to Denmark in this [3] comparison of Canada, US and the Nordic countries rather than being almost twice as high as the rest if using 22wks as a threshold. However, my understanding is the US has higher pre-term birth rates which is certainly a confounding factor so the difference might not only be due to birth registration differences.
The reason you had no idea about this is because it's complete bullshit. Of course other first world countries don't count it differently just to make the numbers sound better.
Because even with that, related normalized numbers are still shit. It's not just some counting problem.
"Women in the U.S. have long had the highest rate of maternal mortality related to complications of pregnancy and childbirth. In 2020, there were nearly 24 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., more than three times the rate in most of the other high-income countries we studied"
"The U.S. infant mortality rate (5.8 deaths under one year of age per 1,000 live births) is 71 percent higher than the comparable country average (3.4 deaths)"
The < 24 weeks old definition of infant in the US is absolute bullshit. An infant is 1 year or younger across the board. Perhaps you have you wires crossed and are misremembering that some countries don't count live births if significantly premature like Norway (<12 gestation). But US does it like most of Europe.
I remember reading years ago that the US tries very hard to save premature babies, and when they fail, it is counted as infant mortality. Whereas other countries do not act so aggressively, and count it as miscarriage.
This happens all the time with popular statistics, especially when politics are involved.
A few years back, there was a great hue and cry over the fact that half of corporations did not pay income tax. A little digging showed that that half had lost money, and so did not have income to pay tax on.
You share this little nugget of enticing unconventional wisdom without doing the briefest google search to find out you, too, are repeating bullshit.
Most countries, especially the developed countries the US is otherwise most comparable to, use WHO definitions, and any independent sign of life is considered a live birth. In other words if there is any life there to save, it doesn't matter if you try to save it or not, it counts.
It is ironic, because if the US was trying much harder to save babies than other developed nations (which doesn't pass the smell test IMO), that should only result in a lower infant mortality rate, not a higher one, unless their efforts were somehow having a negative impact on survival.
You as well may be mixing up the notion that a few countries don't count births before certain gestational lengths or bodyweights as live births (see [1]), however that has been accounted for in international comparisons and doesn't explain the discrepancy between the US and other developed (and some developing) nations.
Regarding corporate income tax example, you are missing the part where the corporations [2] that 'lost money' at tax time are often highly profitable and paying no income tax was only possible through offshoring of profits and use of accelerated depreciation with some favourable corporate tax breaks and loopholes.
> if the US was trying much harder to save babies than other developed nations (which doesn't pass the smell test IMO), that should only result in a lower infant mortality rate, not a higher one, unless their efforts were somehow having a negative impact on survival.
Think about it some more - it will result in a higher rate because others would classify it as a miscarriage. Your own cite says:
"variations in recording of births and deaths at the limits of viability compromises international comparisons."
Depreciation is a legitimate business expense. You're arguing that corporations really have two sets of books - one for the IRS and then one where we use your definition of profits. They didn't make profits according to the IRS accounting rules. IRS accounting rules on what profits are are the only rules that matter.
My source supports me attempting to steelman your claim by suggesting you mistakenly are referring to live births gestational age thresholds. That's not at all the same as a difference driven by how aggressive attempts to save premee lives are across countries.
I read it about 10 or 15 years ago. I'd google various things like "Canadian definition of miscarriage". I did this for a sampling of various countries. There was wide variation.
At the time America tried to save preemies earlier than anyone else. Of course, this had a high failure rate, and they were classified as infant mortality. Developing techniques to save them can only happen if you're pushing the envelope.
Another way to think about it: with 8 billion people alive, humankind collectively experiences more time in 2 years than the presumed age of the Universe.
Where do you get that average life expectancy of 10-12? I never heard a figure that low, and I doubt humanity would have lasted that long if the average life expectancy was barely enough to reach sexual maturity. Also, I think these life expectancy in the past stats mostly do not distinguish between the extremely high death rate for infants, and the more normal life expectancy for those that survived past 2 y.o. The distribution is so skewed, I guess even the median expectancy would not be really useful.
Agriculture actually gives ample time to do something else, even with labor-intensive crops like rice versus wheat. Ancient people probably worked fewer hours that we do nowadays.
It always seems that we discover artifacts that push history farther back. Göbekli Tepe is 12,000 years old and I doubt hunter gatherers made this. I think sophisticated societies existed well past what we have discovered, but time has made it exponentially difficult to get historical proof except in bits and pieces.
I think of it this way: time is like space. Things far back in time are like things orbiting distant stars. Go too far and telescopes can no longer see.
This is made more real by the fact that the Earth is a boiling cauldron of plate tectonics, weather, and biological processes. It doesn’t take long for all traces of something to be obliterated. Maybe we think the first great civilizations were in the desert just because things decay slower in the desert.
People often make the assumption that everyone was just roaming primitive hunter-gatherer cavemen chasing deer across the plains until one day somebody just happened to suggest "Hey, why don't we stop here, start some large-scale intensive agriculture, and build a city?"
That's beyond extremely unlikely.
People lived in villages sustained by horticulture, fishing, local hunting and gathering, and pastoral herding long before intensive agriculture. Probably at least 5,000-10,000 years before. They could certainly have built other things if they had a use for them, and would use them long enough to make it worthwhile. Those that migrated seasonally from one village to another, year after year, might have done so.
Sure, but the notion that hunter-gatherers built something as large and complex as Göbekli Tepe seems unlikely. Construction required a sustained effort by expert craftspeople over many years. They would have needed a higher level of organization and more surplus resources than primitive hunter-gatherers could sustain.
I mean, I think this is part tautological because you've defined them as primitive and not craftspeople. Couldn't they be non-primitive but largely nomadic craftspeople?
(Gokebli Tepe in particular has evidence of processing of grains, but not large scale farming of them, and they might have only settled there for part of the year.)
How exactly could nomadic people develop advanced masonry skills? Are there any proven examples of nomadic people building large, complex permanent structures? What were all the architects and construction workers eating at the job site?
"How exactly could nomadic people develop advanced masonry skills?"
By being half nomadic. When you move around and set up camp often and build temporary structures out of wood, there is opportunity to learn masonry.
And when you often visit the same places, and evertime you add something permanent and more lasting, then specialists will develope.
Nomadic people were usually not changing place everyday. They changed places, once the game in the area were exhausted or the temperature became too cold/warm. But next year, they come back to a good spot. And so over the years important spots can get sophisticated buildings.
There are thousands of remnant river and ocean rock walled fish traps all across Australia, some were very large and they all received a bit of annual touch up and modification for thousands of years .. until Europeans with river boats blasted many to clear passage and pushed off their traditional owners to reservations or worse.
Or maybe your assumptions about agriculture/surplus/specialization are wrong. I'd start by digging deeper into existing evidence instead of evidence free speculation of complex agricultural societies lost to time.
> Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted.
Not really, agriculture took thousands of years to breed productive crops, that were worth cultivating. Wild ancestors of modern crops where hardly worth growing, if at all. Like there were many parts of the world where they literally weren't.
Once the crops became more productive, transitioning to to agriculture made a lot more sence.
Graeber and Wengrow contest that take severely with their survey of modern anthro and archaeological research, I recommend their papers or Dawn of Everything
Yes highly recommended. For those not familiar, Dawn of Everything essentially starts with the assumption that people have always been curious, intelligent, flexible creatures, and that smaller core populations let a ton of different societal organizations be tested and tried over the years. They also take aim at the "farming is inevitable and the root of inequality" trope that's prevalent. Since, as they show, a ton of really large societies over the years chose not to become primarily agricultural.
Yes, large societies including many that have been shown to have discovered agriculture much earlier on than expected, and chose not to build hierarchical societies around it / found alternative structures. I particularly liked the several wacky varieties of "police" such as the clown ones
One intriguing line of analysis in _The Dawn of Everything_ is how people in early settlements would often just pack up and leave when their leaders started acting like a*holes (think human sacrifices in Mesoamerica). That reminded me of how many citizens abandoned frontier towns during the late Roman period, often helpfully directing advancing northern tribes where the wealthiest villas might be found.
Maybe the peoples in earlier times were simply less willing to put up with being bullied and exploited. Relatively low numbers and abundant unsettled land gave them more options that many humans have had since. The Nile watershed was a wonder of ancient agricultural engineering: it was also the largest slave society up to that point in history.
Have you read the book? What I remember is that it took 5000 years for the transition to happen, and that human went back in forth with the two systems.
That was far from a black and white transition.
Hunther gatherer knew about farming and were actually farming
Also: trash and bones of the two groups indicate that farming was more subject to instability and shortage of nutrients. ( as backward as it sound for us )
You're missing a lot of nuance. Graebers work is great. Tons of evidence-based discussions and thorough logic. What you've written here is even really deserving of a forum post.
Yeah but that chain of comments was originally talking about James C. Scott "against the grain". A historian specialized in early agricultural history and thus relevant here in that comment section about early human history.
I even got confused and thought that Scott wrote "bullshit job", but it's Graeber.
In regards to jobs: I think it's perfectly conceivable that one job is useful to a few, but generally pointless for society.
The knowledge a person can acquire and bring to next generation is key here. The more organized, free and widespread this knowledge is, the higher the probability it will survive.
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
Without wisdom, all is for naught. Consider internal combustion engines. Within the ICE is a long range agglomeration of knowledge and techniques ultimately allowing it to be produced in inconceivable quantities. It has also been incredibly harmful in more ways than one, the most salient and widely agreed upon being climate change.
And of course such inventions of knowledge don't act alone, and they independently have large effects, but are also affected by other factors, for instance empirical medicine has had a tremendous effect on population size, and that has in turn spurred more demand for more ICEs which has fed into the gross consumption of fuel products, and in addition obviously the production of byproducts like greenhouse gases. It also prompted what I would classify as a pretty significant terraforming project in the development of infrastructure. It also remodeled society.
Without hazarding inductive error in an ineradicably complex system which exists in in "infinite" timeline both in the context of the fractaline nature (e.g. shoreline paradox) and the sheer quantity of nonparallel time, this is important when considering the probability of black swan events. As an instance of this Benoit Mandelbrot reviewed the Black Monday data, finding that the vast majority of movement in the market occured in a window of about 10 seconds (if memory serves) And Black Monday itself was a small fraction of a year, of a decade, but nonetheless has an outsized effect.
Without meaningful prescience of what will unfold as a product of snowballing knowledge (not to mention the signal:noise) it's very probable that humanity will endure the treadmill or worse be rubberbanded back. Development shouldn't really be looked at in absolute terms, but relative. We increase carrying capacity of some natural resource and just as quickly stack the burden back up. And using a historical lens is dubious, hazarding some calculated risk whose contours we're actually unfamiliar with, and that is something humanity is accelerating with the novel technologies we're wont to spin off.
These things are the result of knowledge, but without some perspective wisdom to guide it, it is dangerous. And I would argue that wisdom is not something that can be transferred. It's the hard-fought and learned but not taught sort of understanding. Humility, compassion, understanding. Knowledge is hubris, dispassionate, and myopic.
All that to say that knowledge isn't the key. It is a tool, but it is not the principal tool. It is also not the principal bottleneck.
I think the most obvious explanation, one that doesn't even require much imagination because it just coincides with the very concept of history and pre-history, is that people lost a lot of stuff when only oral tradition was kept and the threshold of complexity that could be reproduced reliably over generations was rather small and also asymmetric: stuff that could be kept inside of tales of general interest could be carried much further in space and time than things that would be specific or narrow in audience.
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
> So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal
And then even more rapidly with the printing press and regular, reliable mail services.
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
Historically, it has always only taken 'a village' to raise a civilization. Is a million (~1 in a thousand) inquisitive minds (globally) too generous or too low a figure? There has to be at least 100k serious minds and they are networked. That's a lot of brain power. And the trash consumers are definitely serving a purpose. They are both social ballast (providing the necessary inertia for stability of norms) and economic precursors (by fueling the low value economic activities that support high value 0.1% projects and aims). Those n billion eyeballs are the reason the 100K can teleconference in realtime and soon have AI assistants chipping in.
Are they? Shouldn't the place be famous by now where those 100k people meet? I would rather think that those 100k are spread all over the internet and that their innovations are lost like the many Yanomamö innovations that must have happened over time.
Everything is organized in timelines. Things fade into obscurity once the focus shifts. There is plenty of innovation but I doubt that a network of 100k minds can be maintained without everybody else trying to steer it into their directions and thus destroying it.
OpenAI vs Google, Meta's legless avatars, etc. FAANG is known, but are they the village to rise the next level of civilization?
People at FAANG are at the center of our culture. Can they question the foundation of their wealth? Maybe Apple will allow them to sacrifice a cash cow. Otherwise, it takes an outsider like Tesla to facilitate change that had been possible for quite some time.
Unless I misread things, the article is about a hypothesis, that before the current era, many tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure.
My own conjecture, is that the material/scientific/intellectual process that seems to have started around the time of agriculture, and which has been accelerating ever since until we're all sucked into this global mechanical survival process, is driven mostly by the number of people able to sit around and think about surviving in this runaway process (i.e. they face Malthusian pressure, they want and need more), and also their ease of communicating with each other. People pondering how to feed themselves more in large forums come up with ways to transform the world physically through their collective labour. Such a runaway process would not likely occur in a small stable population without the pressure to do so in the first place.
> tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure.
Yes, but you left out an important bit of context:
"The obvious reason why the Yanomamö didn't reach a Malthusian condition was their high level of violence. The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm och game to hunt. For security reasons they had to leave large swathes of land as buffers between villages. These buffer lands made excellent hunting and foraging grounds, which helped feed the population, but any tribe that settled these lands more permanently would most probably be raided and killed by neighboring villages."
So "being free of food pressure" != "living in a utopian paradise".
We've decided violence is only good when carried out by the state, but if you take a look around, it's quite popular. Our entertainments dwell on subjects of human violence, and many of our recreations are forms of simulated violence. It is second only to sex amongst things that occupy our minds.
> [Violence] is second only to sex amongst things that occupy our minds.
This might be a hyperactive, coked-up view of humanity. Ultimately, we're mammals. And, have you ever kept a mammal as a pet? Their favorite things are basically eating and finding cozy places to sleep, whether that's in a pool of sunlight or in someone's lap. Indeed, getting a good meal and a comfortable night's sleep are among my highest priorities. If I had to worry about jungle-tribes attacking me, I'd probably start walking until I'd crossed the Bering Strait -- or I'd build a raft and go set out for Austronesia. A sunny island and some coconut trees, that's all I need. A honey too? Sure, that'd be nice, but I'm not going to swing war-clubs around over it. I'd have to reach an extremely high level of annoyance before anything came to that. I'd much prefer to slowly carve giant stone heads.
Some mammals are warm and cuddly but far from all of them are. Wolverines are mammals but I wouldn't want to have one as a pet. Chimps will quite literally rip your arms out of their sockets if you get on their wrong side. Lions, tigers, bears, hippos, orcas... all mammals, but none of them are good pet material.
Even many (larger) dogs aren't good pets: just like chimps, they'll viciously attack you (or your child) on a whim. I'm not sure why anyone wants a "pet" capable of such destructive power. Even cats can turn violent, but they're so small that they can't hurt people much if they go berserk. Same goes for the "toy" size dogs.
The advantage off agriculture is not quite so clear. Early farming was barely more efficient, one farmer barely producing more than they themselves consumed. And the decrease in diversity of foodstuffs made them each individually less nourished compared to the variety of berries and nuts the foragers would eat. Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle. What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership.
>Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle.
If hunter gathers had so much free time, they must have had a lot of sex. And yet despite this, their populations never reached that of agrarian societies. This means that either they didn't live such abundant lives or they did for certain period and either starved or killed each other when their environment reached carrying capacity.
>What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership
What farming society had was organization and numbers. It's odd to claim that people who grew up with a hoe or parchment end up more violent than those that grew up with a bow. Until the invention of firearms, hunter gatherers tended to be the better fighters. The way that kings and emperors defeated them was my pitting them against each other, but if they managed to unite, they were unstoppable, like Atila the Hun or Genghis Khan.
The huns and mongols were pastoralists, not hunter gatherers. A hunter gatherer society can’t maintain a large enough population in a given geographic area to compete with agrarian or pastoralist cultures, in terrain suitable to those lifestyles.
Also above a fairly low threshold how many children a woman has isn’t proportional to how much sex she has. One man can have sufficient sex with several dozen women to keep them at a maximal rate of child production.
Many, many animals do also. Tigers inform each other of their whereabouts through complex scent markings that contain pheromones, and they violently defend their territory. The American black bear does so similarly. Male mice are territorial and do not tolerate unfamiliar males within their home range. Many lizards are territorial. Fish territories are generally ruled by a single individual or breeding pairs. Active root segregation and the defence of space by plants indicates that plants are probably also territorial. So "the concept" of land ownership is not remotely a uniquely human trait.
Even many agricultural societies still had seasonal nomadic tendencies during which they hunted and gathered. Many sedentary societies lived and worked communally without much social stratification. The reason we associate agriculture with centralization is that centralized agricultural societies conquered the others, not that centralization is inherent to agriculture.
To elaborate on this point: without agriculture centralization wasn't advantageous (or possible) but with agriculture centralization is advantageous--so centralized societies outcompete and are "selected for" over non-centralized societies and we end up with a "genotype" of societies having the trait of centralization.
If anything, farming made societies more susceptible to famine. Specialization of labor and dependence on a specific plot of land made it much harder to simply move somewhere else when food was scarce. Hunter-gatherers and herders were almost always nomadic and moved to wherever food was available.
I don't think it's about people being able to communicate with each other and enjoy leisure, but people developing the tools to handle larger and larger communities.
One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint
Hammurabi is still one of the most popular characters in history because of his code that planted the seed of the embryo of "presumption of innocence", a huge revolution for humanity. He was also very good and efficient at tax collection, so he could finance huge irrigation projects that made it possible to give cultivable fields to the poorer segment of the population, partially solving land abandonment.
In a sentence. he was good at politics.
So as fire and the wheel are symbols of the birth of the modern man, politics is the tool that bootstrapped modern societies.
The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm och game to hunt. For security reasons they had to leave large swathes of land as buffers between villages.
That's the result of the lack of politics, what you are referring to is policies that kept the different groups separated based on their choices or caused splits among them.
Hammurabi was a great politician because he reunited the Mesopotamian tribes in a single state city, convincing them to work for a common goal, making them all prosper together.
The Yanomamo were one of probably thousands of different groups that lives in the prehistoric era. One problem in the study of prehistoric human life is that only a few groups kept their way of life consistent from prehistoric times to modern. So these groups have strongly influenced our perceptions of what life was like in the prehistoric era. But this is inaccurate sampling if we want to draw conclusions about prehistoric life. More nuanced looks at the evidence, such as the dawn of everything, find more diversity, including politics among different groups in the prehistoric age.
>> able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests
>> The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.
This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.
Literacy in itself does not "make a horse run any faster".
But ancient literacy is correlated with more developed and bigger states (empires) whose ordinary inhabitants aren't constantly threatened with wars and enjoy certain protections of the law. Such countries also build roads and engage in extensive internal and external trade. In such a stable environment, culture is easier to cultivate. And horses on well-built roads do travel faster.
Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. Not many humans can accurately recall the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple of sheets of paper, and even if they could, unless the messenger is known to the recipient, there's an issue of trust (written/sealed communications are generally much harder to forge).
> Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster.
This is an interesting discussion. My thought is that there are quite a few variables influencing when literacy/writing becomes an important technology:
a) durability and portability of media: most is either light and degrades easily or durable but heavy and harder to transport.
b) manufacturing cost: papyrus was used for millenia in the west but was never widespread because its production was time and labor intensive. Ink and dye would be another cost. Most stuff just wasn't worth the cost of writing down.
c) population size/density and network effects: small populations wouldn't benefit much because it would be more cost effective to trasmit and preserve information orally. Similarly, large but diffuse populations wouldn't benefit much because the cost of scribes and materials would be high relative to the population served. Given that writing is a "two-sided market" (needing both a trained writer and reader) then the value of writing is somewhat proportional to the size of the network of scribes. Given that scribes are expensive, it would take some time to bootstrap the network. It seems only large and dense populations would see an economy of scale for writing.
It seems like a number of factors have to line up before writing presents a favorable economy of scale for information transfer and preservation.
> the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple sheets of paper
The Iliad / Odyssey was a purely oral story for a long time. Oral traditions definitely included techniques that would allow any person to memorize vastly more than just a couple sheets worth. For that matter, we still have Hafiz around -- people who memorize the entire Koran and can recite it word for word. Or in non-verbal data, London cabbies with The Knowledge.
Not really quibbling with the point that literacy and writing is important, but the human brain is mutable enough that statements about what the average person "can't" do are suspect.
>And it's almost certain the details got changed with each retelling!
As a former Classicist who studied this in grad school, I can say this is unequivocally false. Rhapsodes of the ancient world had a fairly established canon, by the time of Pisistratus it was in the form we know today. The meter and structure of the poem reinforced preserving its structure and contents so that rhapsodes could recite the poems fairly verbatim. I memorized book 1 of the Odyssey in Homeric Greek as a class assignment, it's actually not too hard, esp. if you do learn with the meter.
Hmm, well I'll defer to your expertise then, but if nothing else the language Homer used isn't even in use any more...how many people still read/listen to it in Ancient Greek? And I gather it was still many many centuries since those stories were first told before they were written down at all.
I'd also think memorizing something when you have a written-down text to refer to is one thing, whereas repeating a story you've only heard told verbatim is quite another.
I suspect literacy is a necessary but not sufficient enabling technology for more rapid social and technological change. China has had pervasive literacy longer than anywhere else yet stagnated culturally and technologically due to its political conditions. Conversely the development of moveable type printing in Europe, which can only have a real effect with widespread literacy, lead to an explosion of social and technological change.
You do know that child game where you are told a story, and you have to pass it on to the next, who will have to tell it based on only your story, etc. It doesn’t need much to make absolutely no sense.
It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.
Depending on your POV, is it sad that societies and cultures are becoming more homogeneous? Isn't there less diversity as time goes by in the modern world. The speed of development is good but is it at a cost to diversity?
You have it spot on, but I think you are out by orders of magnitude, possibly a million hours back then, maybe more. This is the essence of why things are moving so quickly now.
That power was diminished by the capitalized title appearing right after the first word in the sentence, which thus was also capitalized. Adding quotes would have made it easier to parse I guess.
Not sure, those elites were more literate and educated than even the 1% of today could hope. Collective wankery produces a lot of noise, and more difficult than ever to cut through it
It’s also a bit self serving. Essentially we’re saying, “Yeah it looks as though I’m just doodling around on my phone while I work in online ads, but really, my life is 1000x more valuable to the future of humanity than that of some random Neanderthal, serf or even Caesar. (Oh, and btw, I don’t even have kids.)”
I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.
For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.
It’s true the physical evidence for some of this is fairly spotty because natural materials degrade or disperse, but I think the basic outline is sound. It’s also true the middle Palaeolithic in the region of some 300k years ago represented quite a significant advance in stone tool technology, but material culture was still very elementary for a huge span of time after that.
The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture.
The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years.
I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.
There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them:
Rough stones are easy enough to find if they needed to file them but if you've ever seen the hands of someone who does a variety of hard manual work every day it's more likely their nails were just worn and broken naturally with the odd bit chewed off.
If you're careful you can bite a spot and then use a different nail to break the longer part without much hassle
It's a lot less destructive to the teeth and has the bonus of smoothing the nail
I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege?
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
> The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory.
Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
> Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
We definitely have examples of people just flat out rejecting things because they are new. Even small improvements. I think there is room in history for both leaders who are open to invention as long as it doesn't appear destabilizing and leaders who reject almost any change as a potential threat to the fundamental structure of society.
The same way we would treat someone today who wants to build an engine powered by magnets, gravity or fueled by water. Someone who wants to map personality traits onto the position of the celestial bodies. Someone who wants to build a device to talk with people in the after life. Someone who wants to use remote viewing or channeling to discover useful things. etc etc
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
Cultural inertia: same reason society moves slowly today even when a small group of people are convinced they have a much better way. When change requires the whole group, the change has to be clearly advantageous (high reward, low risk, or both). That's because there is a material and information overhead to change, with bigger changes being more costly.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.
And most importantly: who controlled that new invention.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.
I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
> Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally.
The amount of industrial engineering required to make a ballpoint pen is quite substantial the click mechanism isn’t the impressive part making balls which are dimensionally accurate to 0.1 micrometer is the challenging part.
Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism.
And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
Hmm, there are retractable fountain pens like the Namiki Vanishing Point, and even Sharpies that are retractable. I think it'd be fair to say the clicky ballpoints represent an excellent combination of cheapness and usefulness, but they don't have a monopoly on retractable points.
And all that engineering happened after someone realized that such a thing would be useful. That classic HN comment about how Dropbox wasn't useful because rsync exists - that's more or less the standard response to innovation. "The thing you've created reduces pain points I'm so used to that I no longer see them". Certain inventions only get made because of really determined, persnickety individuals who will not accept the pain point.
That's the point at which it takes real vision and perseverence to see it through.
It's fascinating the lack of imagination people have for a certain level of innovation. They can see the benefit of small incremental changes pretty well but large disruptive changes fall off a cliff very quickly into a chasm of sceptism - "I'm sure there is something wrong with this idea but I can't think of the problems so I will make up some reasons why it won't work". I feel like this sceptical reaction itself must have an evolutionary basis as it seems highly instinctive.
You can look at the current technological changes in play to day and think about them through this lens and it's quite interesting (AI, obviously, then AR/VR/metaverse etc).
I was hit by that thought last week whilst changing a seal in a Geberit (concealed cistern toilet). The engineering that has gone in to making a mechanism that will work under water for decades , and can be entirely disassembled and reassembled through an opening the size of the flush panel, is pretty incredible
And when you really get to details it is even more complex. The bowl is actually hollow in parts. And then consider correctly and effectively routing the water. And then mass producing complex 3d object and essentially perfectly glazing it.
It would be fairly easy to come up with calculus reasoning about mathematics in the way we do today, because the tools we're using to do maths is highly conducive to calculus in particular.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots.
If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).
The Darwin vs Wallace example is completely different from the Newton vs Leibniz.
In both cases, neither stole ideas from the other. However, at least my understanding, is that Newton and Leibniz did the work at the same time, but because Newton already had a reputation, Newton took all the credit. In the case of Darwin vs Wallace instead, Darwin had years and years of research, notes, and writings done but unpublished, but he rushed to publish when he heard that Wallace had similar ideas. So in a sense, Darwin didn't walk away with more credit than he deserved, as he was there first anyway. Newton vs Leibniz doesn't look as clear cut.
(By the way, in before Edison vs Tesla, that's yet another entirely different situation of plain exploiting and stealing of Tesla by Edison)
I don't know if it is that different. Darwin and Wallace still came up with the same radical theory within decades of one another, quite a coincidence. The natural explanation is that the theory was a result of other human developments making their observations possible.
I agree. For reference, the underlying cause of the Darwin and Wallace coincidence was the establishment of modern geology by Hutton (which established the earth was old and naturally mutable), along with the large-scale collection of biological observations by naturalists such as Darwin and Wallace.
Fun unrelated Darwin fact: he's the person who figured out the geology of how and why coral reefs and atolls form where they do.
Yes, I thought using Calculus as an example actually eroded the point they were trying to make since it was independently developed by Leibniz and Newton.
Not to cast any shade on either of those two brilliant people, but it does suggest Calculus was "ready" for 17th-century mathematicians (or, you know, the other way around).
You are looking at this the wrong way. It might have occured much earlier in history, but only after the invention of industrialized book-printing could that knowledge be actually be transfered between different geographies and generations in an efficient way.
Book-printing presses have been one of the most influential inventions ever for precisely that reason.
And for precisely the same reason, the internet is now the most influential invention today. The fact that knowledge is available at a click of your finger tips is astounding. After all, the only thing differentiating humans from animals is the way humans can encode and transmit knowledge beyond their own life times.
I would imagine the next biggest influential invention is AGI.
Because there was no way to make money on it. Before the Age of Discovery, there wasn't much money in being able to find out one's coordinates in the open sea - and Age of Discovery only started because a long, grinding war to liberate Spain and Portugal from Muslims had to finish first to provide both economic base for seafaring, and safety of sailing too. And maths mainly developed for the goal of improving navigation.
Newton was Master of the Royal Mint for something like 30 years and put people to death for clipping coins. He spent decades trying to manufacture gold. I would say money was a very big motivator. Don’t know about Leibniz.
That wasn't his money, though. He apparently received a salary between £500 and £600 per year, While that was a lot more money than it is now, an inflation calculator at the Bank of England suggests that it was the equivalent of around £43,000 today (around $US53,000 at today's exchange rate).
Not starvation wages, certainly, but neither was it vast riches.
IIRC the money motivation for Newton made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful if applied to calculus and physics.
> made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful
You wouldn't have known in Newton's time if alchemical transmutation into gold worked. Certainly, you knew then that some substances could be transformed into other substances, and it was such research that developed into modern high-school chemistry.
I thought the point was made with the comment about the "zeitgeist" (although the word is misused a bit in this context).
In as much as things build upon other things, you were not likely to get Calculus before, say, Algebra. But once all the pieces are in place the field is wide open for the smart people of the time to plunder it.
Or at least bent to purpose, in this case the narrow zeitgeist of the 17th Century European numerate intellectuals .. those were the days of very slow limited copy exchanges of the latest thoughts by mail and by word of mouth via salons.
Somewhat like Mastodon with the bandwidth of a hikers backpack full of parchment.
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.