Ambient1

I got thinking the other day, how apparently Homo Sapiens emerged 195,000 years ago (see here) but we only have about 10,000 years of "Known History". I'm not an anthropologist, but since these were Homo Sapiens does that not mean that they were physically identical to us today?

So what happened?

Obviously, it took time for things like languages to emerge. But there still must have been some sort of rudimentary communication before that. And I can't see this "rudimentary communication" taking very long before it emerged into a simple language.

But for around 150,000 years, we used nothing more complicated than a sharp stone as a tool.

Only starting 50,000 years ago, did we start manufacturing more complex items: Harpoons, flutes for music etc. Obviously there was some sort of culture.

But still, for another 40,000 years, no records or histories exist.

Only within the last 10,000 years is there any form of recorded history.

The only thing I can think of, is that somehow our brains changed around 10,000 years ago. And changed in a big way (emergence of symbolic thought perhaps?). But would that not mean that we are a new species?

If we aren't a new species, what happened? What took us so long to get to where we are today?

jorgelito

I thought I read somewhere (maybe even on this board) that in the known history of mankind, what we've been "doing" is mostly warring with each other. I think the statistic was, out of the know history of mankind, we've only had 46 years of peace. It's amazing our species is still alive even.

Oddly enough, I believe there is a domino effect: once people started interacting more and competing for resources, technology advanced more rapidly. Combined with the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian economies also allowed for "advancement" - surplus food stocks allow specialization and sustenance of larger populations. War then, was a great catalyst for human achievement (in terms of science and technology).

Lastly, I believe the rise and spread of Christianity altered the landscape of mankind for good (in terms of its inluence on politics, war, language, art, music, economy, social, migration etc).

So, like you said, the first 100,000 or so years would look like a real gentle graded slope on a graph with the steep spikes occuring at the places I indicated above (ice-age recedes, migration - shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian economies; Ancient civilizations or antiquities; then rise and spread of Chritianity, then Industrial Revolution). I think the last 2000 years probably can be considered explosive in growth and achievement as well as war etc.

I'm curious as to the next 1000 years, or even 10,000 ( I can't even begin to fathom that, wow!).

akito

I don't think we'll be around for anywhere near 10,000 years. We'll destroy ourselves long before that. That's my own opinon though.

kramus

Some people believe that thought constructs that can be transfered between people and societies are the triggers that engender massive changes in our inner and outer landscapes. One of these "memes" is abstract thought. The major traceable changes are currently tied with cultural discoveries. The 50,000 year old surreal carvings in mammoth ivory discovered a little while ago in Germany are at about the furthest back we've found actual evidence of the workings of the mind as opposed to the intelligent animal (fire and worked stone go back to proto-human races long extinct, I believe). The cultural evidence coincides with a dramatic upswing in territory inhabited, artifacts (including petroglyphs and paintings) and sophisticated tools (such as stone that would require a 2 stage working to aquire it's functionality. Humans have been very very busy - we just don't have the softer evidences of their lives due to the effects of time. But I am sure as sure can be that there have been many amazing, complex and sophisticated accomplishments that validated the people of those lost eons just as our science and our cultural noise is the touchstone that many people use to validate the race in the last 5-10 thousand years.

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NoSoup

I have given this some thought in the past as well. The amazing thing, though is not the past 10,000 years, or even the past 1,000 - it's the past 100. Take a look at photos from 1900 and compare them with today. We have changed the earth so much in the past 100 years and come out with so many crazy technologies, and it only seems to be increasing in pace. Granted, roads were around prior to that, but not the hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of miles of paved roads put down in the last 100 years. Microwaves, Television, Telephones, The Internet ect are brand new - I am very curious to see what is going to happen in the next 100 years, I can't even begin to fathon the next 1,000.

Oh and as far as how humans were pretty much warring with each other all the time, that certainly may be true - but we have recently become much, much more effective at killing each other. Beating 100,000 people to death with a rock takes a helluva lot longer than dropping a Nuclear Bomb on a city...

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hannukah harry

mind qualifying this? why do you think christianity made such a big difference?

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Ambient1

Some might argue that Christianity repressed new ideas in the not so recent past. Progress was their enemy, loosening thier control on society.

How many visionaries were burned at the stake or excommunicated?

But that isn't really what I wanted to discuss here.

tecoyah

Humankind is currently at a crossroads of evolution, and yes, it was a start and stop road to get here. Since the onset of the technology revolution, we have changed the form of evolution from a natural selection based on environment controlling our direction, to one in which we can control the environment and thus evolution. It seems to me that it will come to this one general question:

Are we smart enough to guide these next steps into something productive, or will we continue to focus on the destructive nature of our species?

The answer to this will decide our fate in the long run.

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feelgood

I think the question's already been answered. At the beginning of last century, humankind engaged in the largest war, if not, two, in our history of the species. At that point, I think we came to realize that war was not the answer and thus, our next evolution in society has begun into a new society where wars may even become obsolete. Today, we're still evolving into that society. You have to remember, it took us 1000 years to get out of the dark ages, few hundred years to smack ourselves in the head and figure that we're not centre of the universe, few decades to figure out that gravity is there, few hundreds years to figure out that white and black people are pretty much the same, and so on, so forth.

Change takes time, it's just a matter of whether or not we embrace it.

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Looking out the window, that's an act of war. Staring at my shoes, that's an act of war. Committing an act of war? Oh you better believe that's an act of war

ranger

making movies, writing songs
fightin' round the world...

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Charlatan

having a lot of sex and a lot of babies... incidentally, given the number of people around today and given that we all arose from a comparatively smaller number of people... a lot of inscest has been going on as well.

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irateplatypus

it's a mistake to think that human society, in total, is evolving... it's changing, but not necessarily evolving (as in, becoming more adept at dealing with the world).

perhaps the only evolving aspect of human existence is that of technology. it, alone has remained relatively constant. it is technology that has shaped how the cyclical perceptions of race, God, and culture are played out (in terms of scope and intensity).

while aristotle and pythagorus would have turned up their nose at medieval conceptions of science... they would have marveled at the ballista's and other siegeworks of the times. such inventions are the result of technological progress, not scientific. no one in the middle ages could define gravity/centrifugal forces etc. but they could construct what the ancients could not, even though the ancients possessed a conception of science much more like our own. technological progress is not directly parallel with scientific progress.

this is why i say human society does not evolve, only taking the same problems conceptualized by similar minds... and filtering them through the next generation of technological achievement.

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If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

flstf

From what I have read the transformation from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a lot to do with the change about 10K years ago. Resulting in the formation of settlements (cities), development of writing, trade with other cultures, and central governments freeing up some artisans, inventors, etc from struggling constantly for food. Hunter-gatherers had to remain in small packs and travel lightly before then.

Why this didn't happen before is a mystery but maybe it just took that long before some of our ancestors had to figure it out. Perhaps they were forced into becomming innovative because of climatic changes.

feelgood

10,000 years ago, the ice age were still here. Human didn't have a chance to get together to form settlements, create a language, etc simply because they were huddled in a cave, freezing their ass off and hoping that food would come along.

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Looking out the window, that's an act of war. Staring at my shoes, that's an act of war. Committing an act of war? Oh you better believe that's an act of war

jorgelito

Hmmm.... I think you guys may have misread my comment. When I said Christianity changed the world for "good", I did not mean it in the value sense as in, for the better. Rather, I meant "for good" as in Christianity has forever altered humanity's landscape (for good or for bad that's up to interpretation).

Why do I say this?

Well, I believe that Christianity had a huge inluence on human events/achievements etc.

The arts - a major influence: patronage, commission, subject matter

Education - monks etc kept learning alive and libraries of knowledge

War - so much war was made in the name of Christianity that arguably has made a huge difference in the past 2000 years. (i.e. - Crusades, Gulf war etc)

Spread of Christianity has led to colonization, imperialism (divine right of kings etc) and of course, more war.

Christianity also influenced concepts like "equality" and the like heavily affecting revolutionary movements, most notably US independence. Christianity was a factor in the birth of the US.

And so it persists today. Just look at the dynamic bewteen Christianity and ....everyone else. Not just internationally, but domestically too. Including issues such as right to life, right to die so on and so forth.

jorgelito

I agree wholeheartedly here. There's so much we can discuss and stuff. Again, I didn't mean to mislead anyone but I guess my lazy writing was too ambiguous.

Anyways, hopefully my response post will help clear things up a bit.

zen_tom

I think it has to do with population density and organisation. Hunter/gathering can't sustain a population over a certain size. Civilisation requires lots of people living and working together in a relatively small area with lots of links of organisation and communication holding everything together. You just can't do that if you're quite happy living off the land in your family unit.

Of course, organisation and civilisation improve the survival of its participating members (just as sharp teeth improve the survival rate of Tigers etc) who in turn support the maintenance of the civilisation.

It's a system of unchecked exponential growth - that is, untill it meets some kind of limiting factor. This kind of happened during the time of the Black Death, where large cities were decimated - the reason - those cities grew too large and too dirty to sustain themselves against disease. Other examples might be the World Wars of the last century, where large, opposing organised populations clashed, and the victorious form of organisation got to stamp its flavour of rules and philosophy on the world.

Beh, I'm rambling on now.

hannukah harry

eh... not really... christianity didn't really influence art any more than rome or greece did... all of them had people in power commisioning art, often the art was religious/quasi-religious. the only real new thing in art that came from 'christianity' (in quotes because i don't think it christianity that caused it, it was just another step in art) was stained glass.

true, but so did islam. while europe's civilzation digressed backwards or stagnated in many areas not related to warfare, islam was creating algebra and increasing our knowledge of astronomy, amongst other things. to try to credit christianity as a major influence in this regard and not give any credit to islam, or the civilizations that are responsible for creating/gaining the knowledge in the first place is just a matter of your personal bias.

most war, even that in the name of religion, is often about greed of the people leading the war. a lot of war in the name of god has been about land, not god. i think even the crusades were more than just a war for god... that was just a way to get the soldiers to fall into line with the war. i'm not sure what the gulf war 1 has to do with christianity, and the current war there doesn't seem religiously motivated either.

again, these were not new thanks to christianity. they were around before it (see greece, rome, persia, pretty much every ancient civ before christianity came around). look to egypt for the divine right of kings with lineage passing to children, or rome where they actually looked at their emperors as being part man/part god (after death).

how so? since when has christianity had anything to do with equality? christianity obviously played some role in the formation of the US as that was the religion of many people involved in the foundation of our country, but philisophical thought of people like voltiare (which i admit to not knowing much about) and other philosophers of that era (in france and england... hobbes and locke too) had more to do with the values of the main people behind the writing of the declaration and constitution than did jesus.

obviously christianity has been aroiund time and has been an influence on a lot of people, but to say that it's been one of the most important things in human history i think is incorrect... it may have had more staying power than other religions (which is really because it managed to kill off the others with the sword) but i would argue religion in general rather than just christianity if you want to make the argument you're making. and the issues that you bring up, they're a product of differing values of our society. christianity plays a role, but a minor one. people on both sides fo the abortion debate and right to die debate are christian. if anything, christianity itself doens't have anything to do with it, individuals interpretations of christianity does. but hey, once islam gets out of their current 'dark ages' they'll be dealing with issues like these... this isn't about religion so much as how certain religoius interpretations interact with other societal values.

personally, i think christianity has held back human society more than moved it forward.

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irateplatypus

i've not read a weaker assessment of the west's development.

i don't mean that as an expression of personal animosity.

__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

jorgelito

Hi Harry, thanks for your response.

I disagree and stand by my original statments. I think you completetly misunderstood my post or maybe just confused. You seem to think that my contention that Christianity had a big influence on humanity somehow takes away from other influences. I never said that; they are two different things.

Christianity most certainly had a hand in influencing art. Subject matter, commissions, patronage - the Church commissioned a ton of works with religious content. The Renaissance & Baroque periods are good examples. Those influences persist to the present day. Yes I know Classical art has a big influence too (just look at Washington DC).

Monks did make major contributions to knowledge and education (libraries, Gutenberg press etc, yes I know the Chinese had printing first). And of course Islamic scholars are tops in their field of math and astronomy (same with the Chinese for that matter). And Christianity did hold back alot as well (Galileo etc). Where's my personal bias that you accuse me of?

Christianity was most definitely a catalyst for war. Maybe not the only reason but still a big factor. The Crusades were about taking back the Holy Lands for Christianity. I'm sure there was greed, personal stuff, what have you as well. I'm not really sure what you are trying to argue about. The Gulf war remark was my attempt at a joke *sigh* (I need to work on it....) you know, cause G-Dub made that quip about Crusades..... *crickets*

Alot of the colonization was under the guise of spreading Christianity (yes I realize there was a lot of mercantilist, state expansion stuff too) but Christianity was big influence still. Look how powerful the Church is. They wield a ton of influence. Yes colonization was done for resources but simultaneously, there was a lot of conversions and spreading the faith. The church owned alot of plantations too (Hawaii, S. America etc.).

I will try to address your other concerns next week. But before I go, I will reiterate or try to clarify: I believe that Christianity was a big influence on humanity or human history whatever you want to call it, specifically in the past 2000 years. I never said it was better or worse or the only influence. But I think it played a major part in shaping our world.

hannukah harry

i don't like turnips.

we aren't talking about the west's development. we're talking about human development (which does encompass the west, but not the west alone). if you decide you'd like to be less vague and discuss exactly what you have a problem with in my previoius post, please let me know. i'd be happy to discuss it.


hey <b>jorgelito</b>,

i think i do understand the point you were trying to make. my point, which probably didn't come across (i didn't state it specifically and looking back doubt anyone would read into it), is basically that you're drawing an arbitrary line line saying that christianity did all this. i'm saying don't draw that line. if you look at civilizations prior to and contemporary with early christianity, you'll see all of these things too. christianity has just extended these things you brought up, they weren't new to the world before that. i realize you didn't say that these other influences weren't there, but by seemingly ignoring them and placing credit for these thigns solely on the shoulders of christianity, you're depicting christianity as existing within a vacuum (in my opinion), which i think is a matter of bias based on your beliefs, rather than looking at the big picture.

and i don't disagree of the influence that christianity had on art. but the subject of the art is related to christianity, the style isn't. and the style is the bigger influence on modern art than the subject matter was. the church definatly helped in that by having commissioned the art and preserving it, but that's no different than other religions/civilizations.

monks definatly made major contributions to maintaining the knowledge of the past. while europe stagnated and declined, the monks copied books by hand, preserving that knowledge for future generations. but how is that different than the egyptians creating the library at alexandria? and teh preserving of knowledge, while important, is not a christian influence on society (unless teh monks only allowed that knowledge to be learned by people in the church or were selective in what they saved).

i like teh gulf war joke (nice connection with teh bush quote)... just since i didn't realize you meant it as one i felt the need to assume you were serious. but on the topic of war, christianity didn't do anything new. they just continued on a tradtion of warfare. most ancient cultures called upon god for help in war, used their gods as a way to rally the troops (the enemy is an affront to their gods and the gods want them destroyed). some of the people who warred in gods name believed in the rightiousness of it, that it was a war for god/s, while others i'm sure were more motivated by power and increased lands. in fact, i'd bet that most of the conquerors in history were at least as interested in the increased lands, money and power, as they were in doing it for god, if not more so for the power. the crusades are interesting because some of them were mainly about god, others seem not to be nearly as god oriented. a large part of them wasn't so much to spread the religion as to protect christianity from the increasing threat of islam. so not exactly something new, just on a larger scale than previously seen.

again, colonialism and imperialism isn't anything new. one of the biggest influences on early christianity was rome, and rome had a long history of colonization and imperialism. whether the colonization of the 'new world' and africa was religously motivated (which i think it wasn't) or not doesn't really matter. it's nothing new. if anything, my opinion is that the america's and africa were colonized to increase europes wealth and power and influence. if there was a real religous motivation for it there would have been much more of an attempt at converting the natives than destroying and enslaving them (spain was the one real exception).

of couse the church had a lot of influence. in those days religion pervaded everything. the kings were kings by divine right, social life of the peasents often revolved around teh church. it was everywhere. but just because the church was there and played a big part in daily life doesn't mean that it was the motivation for why people did everything they did.

i won't argue that christianity hasn't had a big influence on western civilization because it has. but there's more to human history than western civ. (i would still argue that it has had a big influence on human history, but not nearly as big of one when mixed in with non-western civs). but it's influence is based on that which was before it. it's just the next player in the game of life. these things you brought up were around before christianity and will be around after christianity. christianity has just continued on these traditions/practices. and even then, it may have been an influence in subject, but not in style (art) and in reason for war (but not in the tehcnological advancement or strategy).

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Ustwo

This is a very interesting topic.

I don't have a ton of time to get into it but one thing we were doing was almost dying out. Humanity at some point was only a few hundred people, and this has been verified geneticly. As such we spent much of that time recovering as a species.

I do think 'civilization' is older than we currently credit it, but much of that record was wiped out in the last ice age. The ancient shore lines are now under a lot of water and much of the evidence has been hidden under the sea.

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jorgelito

Good show Harry, thanks for the follow-up post,

I see what you're getting at now and I agree. I think we're not too far off here.

One last thing: I think maybe my point would be more the spread of Christianity and it's subsequent influence over the past 2000 years, especially as a "player in the game of life" (I really like your interpretation here in the last paragraph). To use the example of the Library at Alexandria, (truly a marvel) it was one library of maybe a few at the time. However, Christian monks kept libraries all over Europe although not as magnificent as the Library at Alexandria.

Just like there were dominant cultures throughout different time periods: the Ancients (Egypt, Babylonia), Classics (Greece, Rome), Muslim, Chinese, Indian, Meso-American, African - all had their "heights and influence at one point; but in the past 2000 years (along the timeline), western civ has dominated and Christianity played a role.

Turnips? Turnips are ok, I like them in stews sometimes, but what...?

Bedraggled Cat

Do you want the long or the short answer?

The short answer is that yes we are still evolving, there is a significant difference between H. sapiens 100kya and today, particularly in body size and dentition. The face, jaw and teeth of a mesolithic hunter (10kya) are around 10% more robust then those of modern humans, this is thought to be due to the differences in lifestyle e.g. the adoption of agriculture.

The dramatic shift to modern behavior can be explained in two ways - Soffer argues that it was due to social relationships and development of kinship groups, this is debatable as there is evidence for strong kinship links as far back as H. antecessor and the Neanderthals were the first to bury their dead and care for the elderly.

Klein on the other hand argues for a biological change that preceeded fully modern behavior. He believes that a neural reorganisation led to development of new behaviors and cites the newly discovered FOXP2 gene as evidence. FOXP2 thought to control facial movements that lead to the development of sound and its mutation leads to great problems articulating speech. It was discovered by studying a family that in which some members had difficulty both in producing and in processing speech. The gene was localized to the seventh chromosome and subsequently identified as the FOXP2 gene. When compared with other mammals, specifically mice and primates, it was found that it differs by only three amino acids and of these only two are unique to humans.

These are two of the arguments for the development of more complex behavior at around 40/50kya. There is also the argument put forward by Bahn, specifically to do with the development of art, that fully modern symbolic behavior had been around for a lot longer then it is thought but had to do with behavior that is not preserved in the archaeological record. For instance any ritual marking on skin, such as painting or scarification, would not have been recorded.

There is also some evidence for culture before 35kya - such as at Bilzingsleben in Germany a piece of engraved bone was found that was dated at approximately 300,000 years old, while at the Golan Heights in Israel there was found a Venus figure from approximately the same time period. This figure is remarkable in the fact that it has a clearly incised neck separated from the body and that there are two grooves delineating the arms. While no one is arguing that H. erectus carved this out of a piece of formless rock, this is debatable evidence for the production of some sort of art much earlier then the Upper Paleolithic.

The big change at about 10kya is the develpment of agriculture and more sedentary cultures, the so-called "Neolithic Revolution." It seems that all hierachical societies developed after agriculture was adopted, it is thought that storage of food and it's dispersal would have meant that a more structured society was needed then the previous more egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. From these more structed societies developed and this led to the culture explosion that has been termed the "Neolithic revolution."

If I go into the origins of agriculture and it's significance I could be here all day and I have way too much revison to do for that. If anyone is really interested I'll try to get round to it over the weekend.

So far there is no genetic evidence that there was a major genetic/neural shift at 10kya. It seems to be agriculture that influenced it more. And symbolic behavior has been around a lot longer then 10kya, anything between 300kya and 40kya depending on which theory you subscribe to.

And that was the short answer!

pennywise121

wow, sorry for digging up a disused thread, but i have been gone for a while, and am only now catching up.

there are several things going on here that are of particular interest. first, this is not the first time we have developed agriculture. our first try came a little over 100,000 years ago, but failed because of a minor ice age that plagued that time frame. our second attempt seems to have taken better, around 35 to 40 thousand years ago.

Moreover, there have been several tool complexes since homo erectus. Achulean tool appeared about 1.5 million years ago, and served rather well untill about 200,000 years ago when the Mousterian tool complex came about. Mousterian tools hung around until about 40,000 years ago, with the Aurignacian, and more well known Chatelperronian tool complex. so, here's the thing. Homo Sapien Neaderthalensis used achulean tools (including the "big sharpened rock" Achulean hand axe) because the Neandertals were hunting big animals. the chatelperronian tool complex is marked by finely chipped (two step flaking process), and would have been of little to no use in a world where the fauna was as large as it was for H. erectus and H. S. neandertalensis.

anyway, basically, what i am saying is this: we are no different than we were back then. there were no major changes in brain development and no evidence of much change since homo sapiens sapiens (the wise wise man- so wise he named himself twice ) came about. tooth size and shape, and a bit of the sex dimorphism have changd, but that is about it, and i have never come across any evidence that we actually know when those happened.

i can tell you this. H.s.s. original diet was 85% meat. we werent hunter/gatherers. we were hunters that augmented our meat with some berries. so, for all those people who heard that meat is bad for you, remember this, and the fact that there was virtually no incidence of tooth decay or destruction until we became an agricultural species.

sorry for the long post

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Food for thought.

xddga

correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the christians who burnt down the library in alexandria? not to mention the church has always been rather selective and always been pro-censorship on reading materials. If it differed in any way from the churches teachings it was banned/burned/etc. Not to mention authors and free-thinkers where usually proclaimed heretics and executed/imprisioned (example: Galielo [sp?]). Also a lot of things that were done in the name of God was done in greed, like Columbus' return trip to the Americas. He said he wanted to do it in the name of God and spread his word, but in turn it was for the money. As well as trying to convert the native americans and mexicans to christianity... how many died in those peaceful acts? (too clarify I'm not saying this is solely a christian act, almost every single society has been like this. 'cept maybe buddhists and eskimos...)

how true this is... read somewhere that just going back to the roman era, you'd need 12 billion different generations of parents. more ppl then that's ever been alive.

as for what we've been doing, societies can only really grow based on their form of goverment. oppressive leaderships don't give a whole lot of room for outspoken thinkers and artists. not to mention almost all technological advancements have been made of wars (we found out how to obliterate whole cities before we even had a science that tried to understand the brain, and almost every invention you use today first got it's start as an application for war. the internet was developed mainly by the pentagon as a way to communicate between bases incase there was ever a nuclear war and was never intended to have any public release). Also society can only really record itself based on it's technological advancements as well (can't write if you don't have any form of writting tools). And let's not forget the old saying "the victors are the ones who write history."