-
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-
Soon it will kill us all and the radioactive remnants can slowly start again.
Yay! The circle of life.
-
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
Maybe humans just like you or I weren’t able to produce extrasomatic knowledge for ≈280,000 years, which Carl Sagan says is the info stored on mediums external to the/a body, and lasts as long as the medium doesn’t deteriorate. It’s also possible that whatever evidence there was of their achievements has been lost. See the highly effective genocide of the indigenous Americans - they likely had very large villages or even cities built from wood, which would require coordination of labour, sophisticated building techniques and materials knowledge. It’s unlikely that all of this knowledge was passed down orally, but we don’t have much records of whatever their written archives were. The Aztecs for example had universities for their philosophers and priests, but it was all destroyed.
Carl Sagan talks about how humans are the only species that we know of that have developed that. This is everything from stains on parchment to cuneiform on rocks to the internet, and it’s why we can learn directly from Marcus Aurelius millennia after his body’s turned to dust.
PhilPub
Eseman
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?