It's so mind boggling to think that the "Homo Erectus" existed as far back as 1.8 million years ago, yet most of our recent (and known history) happened in the last 5000 years, and we see that as a huge evolution.
What the heck happened between 1 million years ago and now? The human race changed a lot and matured very much, but it's so incredible that such a big evolution only happened in the last few thousand years and the rest has taken hundreds of thousands of years.
In the Chauvet Cave there are cave paintings that are 32,000 year old[1]. But what's even more interesting, is that some of these paintings are only 27,000 year old. Meaning, that these people knew about the place for almost 5000 years. Can you imagine that kind of continuity?
The documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams[2] presents the cave in a breathtaking detail, definitely worth a watch.
[T]hese people knew about the place for almost 5000 years. Can you imagine that kind of continuity?
They must have been members of what David Deutsch calls a "static society". These are societies which actively try to keep things the same, and stamp out any innovation or differences. Things change there so slowly that the change is not noticeable within a single generation. In a 2011 interview with Ken Rose (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/beginning-of-infinity/dr64n4...), Deutsch said that "progress, from the point of view of the human species as a whole, is very recent and very rare. Through most of human history, people would live their entire lives without ever encountering an innovation, whereas now, we take it for granted that iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable."
For more, see his superb book The Beginning of Infinity (2010).
Isn't it that they were just close to the zero on the exponent curve (kurzweil accelerating returns). Constraints very high with little knowledge and little meta-knowledge (just knowing something exists and is possible) giving a very slow pace
Agriculture. It's a several orders of magnitude improvement in the population density an area can support, which makes population centres possible, which makes specialisation viable, which makes everything else possible. If someone had developed agriculture 100,000 years ago, we'd currently be about 90,000 years more advanced than we are now.
Agriculture appears to have been developed independently in the Middle East, China and Americas about 10,000 years ago, but I and some others believe there was more dissemination of ideas, mainly via individual travellers or small groups of travellers, than conventional historians take into account.
One problem with the conventional history is that it's very much oriented around agriculture on plains, using irrigation, with buildings made of stone or clay. This kind of agricultural culture is good for archaeologists because it leaves intact traces that are easy to dig for. But it's not the only kind of agriculture.
There have also been agricultural civilizations that grew rain-fed crops on forest sites and built houses of wood. Like the Maya, or ancient southeast Asian civilizations.
Luckily those peoples did help us out by building stone temples, but I would assume that probably several more civilizations have practiced slash-and-burn jungle agriculture and just not happened to have built monumental temples.
Supporting my hypothesis, one early layer of Jericho seems to reflect a forestal mode of production - something about acorn horticulture[0].
So, I think if we are to find the hidden backstory behind the sudden simultaneous 10,000 YE agricultural revolutions, the place to look would be in the trees. But what do I know.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture#Settlements
"Settlements occur in the woodland belt where oak and Pistacia species dominated...The superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbrick have been found."
This seems to beg the question of what caused agriculture to appear. Although given that it did appear, your explanation seems like a plausible explanation of how it spread and led to the rapid progress we have seen since.
A boring answer to this question is that it was simple incremental changes driven by random mutations and natural selection (eg. evolution). For example, we might have started to occasional plant the seeds of plants as we found them, which could become us regularly doing so. Then we might have started moving the seeds to more central locations, and eventually arrive at agriculture as we know it today. These adaptations may have started before homo-sapiens. If it happened long enough before (so that there is another species with a common ancestor that did this), we could check this by looking for agricultural tendencies in species related to us (If anyone is aware of research on this hypothesis, please post).
A more interesting hypothesis is that agriculture was the result of an abiotic change. Instead of gradually developing agricultural tendencies, we 'immediately' became agricultural following some other event, such as a change in climate. This seems to be consistent with my understanding of climate history, which puts us in a relatively short window of nice climate.
10,000 years ago is the end of the last ice age, before which climates were shifted, sea levels were lower, and most of the land humans tend to like to live on (near sea level) are now deeply submerged.
We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose.
It seems incredibly arrogant to me to think that our ancestors, who were virtually identical to us much of those million+ years, required at-minimum hundreds of thousands of years to figure out what seeds are and how to make them grow. These are people who knew how to live off the land and were far more familiar with plants and animals than most of us could dream of being. These people invented astronomy, art, religion, clothes, tools, fire. They'd notice that plants produced seeds, that seeds wound up on the ground, and that new plants grew where the seeds fell.
I don't buy the atlantis "they're all under the sea" theory at all. We are expected to believe that they only built cities by the coast and none at all along rivers or round lakes? None of these civilizations spread to areas where the sea level has not risen so much? Far too contrived for my tastes.
Il flip your arrogance accusation around. These people developed agriculture and even cities tens of thousands of years ago, yet none of them managed to put together a sustainable survivable civilization? None of them managed to go from basic agriculture to even slightly more advanced agriculture that would have launched them on the track to specialization, even given hundreds of thousands of years in which to try? Why not? What was wrong with them?
To a hunter-gatherer, which is a nomadic lifestyle, cultivation in a fixed area for long enough to both sow and later reap a crop is not at all obvious.
I'm not completely convinced that they were genetically identical to ourselves, we used to evolve quite fast, and faster still after we developed agriculture.
Anyway, if you look at tribes native to the America, about all of them knew about agriculture (it's in their culture), but not all established an agricultural society. What we are calling "developing agriculture" probably is a much more complex phenomenon, with several different (near) contemporary developments, and probably none of them was learning that plants grow from seeds.
* Ok recent humans certainly were similar, and agriculture could probably have appeared a few thousand years earlier, I'm not sure we can extend that to hundreds of thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands.
Climate change is the working hypothesis at the moment. Specifically, general drought/desertification that drove the people at the origins of agricultural technology to a few great river valleys (notably the Nile and the Indus).
"Fungus-growing ants practice agriculture and have been doing so for the past 50 million years according to research published in the Jan. 17 issue of Science. These ants not only grow fungus gardens underground for food but also have adapted to handling parasitic "weeds" that infect their crops."
Nice, but fungus is not a plant strictly speaking "[..] These organisms are classified as a kingdom, Fungi, which is separate from plants, animals, protists and bacteria. [..]" [1]
Which leads to an off-topic question: Is mushroom cultivation considered as agriculture?
I also believe in this explanation, but it would be better if we had hard evidence of certain types of human population thriving and other ones disappearing based on the presence or lack of agriculture.
> the "Homo Erectus" existed as far back as 1.8 million years ago, yet most of our recent (and known history) happened in the last 5000 years, and we see that as a huge evolution.
an exponential process (of life complexity in this case) looks the same at any scale. The Earth has existed for 4B years, life is ~3B years, life as a cell with nucleus ~2B (yea, 1B years to develop nucleus :)
Yet, do you have any explanation for why that process looks like an exponential? It does not fit the "rate of change is proportional to raw size" template that normally creates exponents in nature.
>It does not fit the "rate of change is proportional to raw size"
i kind of see it here. The evolution speed depends on the speed of generating of changes and on the speed of selection of the generated changes.
Wrt. the speed of generating of changes. The more complex a system (i.e. types and number of actors/components and relationships between them) - the more diverse set of small gradual changes/variations to components/relationships/behaviors can happen while the system will still be functioning. In particular it is applicable to biological systems, ie. single cells, colonies, multicell organisms and various groups/societies of it. For example, in general, 2 different species of cells can produce more diverse set of natural variations than 1 species even if the total number of cells is the same in both cases. An example at different scale - one science - philosophy of Ancient Greeks has become a multitude of sciences through the same process of branching/specialization and the speed of this process is proportional to the number of branching/specializing sciences. Following the same principle - there is no way US tax code (or the law in general :) will become simpler anytime in the future :)
I've heard it suggested that language made the big difference. We bummed around for 998 million years, not able to improve our lot much - but somehow, 2 million years ago we developed language, and after that we were able to rapidly improve (and even co-evolve with our improvements - I've heard that the invention of the baby sling allowed our brains to grow larger than without it).
I believe the prevailing hypothesis is that there was a tiny mutation in a human brain ~50,000 years ago that causes spoken language to be possible, but there are other ideas. It's a fascinating area of research:
I've seen the idea batted around that the hybridization of neanderthals and cromagnons set off something of an explosion in evolutionary terms. Art and technology only started getting anywhere in the areas where they had contact some 50,000 years ago. Modern humans are apparently something like 4% neanderthal.
Nothing of interest, really. Just grunts and horrible screams. And lots of f*cking, of course, to compensate for the massive losses due to disease, wild animals, and famine cycles (which, thankfully, modern age shields us from--well, not the f-ing, I mean the rest.)
Sadly, I must once more indicate that this post is sarcastic, for the humor-challenged ones.
There's a difference between "I do not like this, but it adds to the conversation" and "I do not like this, and it adds nothing to the conversation." The point of the moderation system here is to reduce noise and promote signal. One-liners and drive-by sarcasm do not add much to the conversation.
What the heck happened between 1 million years ago and now? The human race changed a lot and matured very much, but it's so incredible that such a big evolution only happened in the last few thousand years and the rest has taken hundreds of thousands of years.