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I find the idea that people were walking around 23,000 years ago and the stuff they'd have seen incredible.
At the risk of pissing off people for chatting in the news thread, a documentary I saw recently made me reconsider the image of prehistoric humans pictured:
Homo sapiens sapiens have been a species for ≈300,000 years, with similar levels of intelligence and creativity, but we generally hold the idea that >13,000 years ago people were just wandering around in loin cloths, living in caves, using stone tools.
It only took us 500 years to go from circumnavigating the globe to putting people on the Moon. 300k years is a long time, perhaps they were less primitive than we give them credit for?
Eseman-
Whilst I'm sure you could take up a human from back then and train them up relatively easily to be just like us now, the main advances have come from societies as a whole being able to save, share and build upon specific knowledge rather then losing much of it each generation from the development of written language through to printing and eventually IT stuff. Big ideas from geniuses are learnt and developed by regular people, technology is incrementally improved upon and that all snowballs quite quickly over the last few hundred years. Soon it will kill us all and the radioactive remnants can slowly start again.
snottyotter
Talking of dead dinosaurs and that sort of thing, archaeologists have found fossilised footprints in New Mexico of what are probably teenagers or children from 22,500 years ago:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02597-1
This blows my mind. The National Park Service Insta has this artist's impression of what this might have looked like. I imagine there's some artistic licence going on here but I find the idea that people were walking around 23,000 years ago and the stuff they'd have seen incredible.