It's wild to think how long very human-like beings and modern humans existed before the technological revolution really took off. Hundreds of thousands of years of existing on the technological level of stone tools, spears, cloth made out of hides, and fire. Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow. Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
I think it is also interesting to realize that we have had a huge population boom since the last 50 years or so, thus currently, the entire world population alive makes up roughly 8% of the entire population of the world since the existence of Homo Sapiens. In summary, if you were to be randomly born as a human, you would most likely be born in the latter centuries, rather than the early ones, since the sheer amount being born recently than many years ago is so much more.
Here's some food for thought: Something like that was their normal and they likely had all of these sorted out with relative ease, given that they'd be experts at that kind of living. Also wild food sources were plentiful. Overall they may have enjoyed more downtime than us, who have to do quite a bit to maintain our higher standards of living. Estimates are that hunter-gatherers "worked" around 20 hours / week to sustain themselves, the rest being spend on low intensity tasks or idle time.
Given how plentiful and available food sources were, I don't imagine their life could have been considered stressful in that regard. As a hunter gatherer there's also a specific point at which there's nothing really left to do: There's no point in hunting/collecting more food than you can eat before it rots. No infinite treadmill to run. Nobody who always has "more" regardless of how hard you work.
You on the other hand have a lot to stress out about in modern society, not even considering that if there's any major breakdowns in the systems we have established to feed our massive populations, such as a disease that wipes out the majority of crops, the majority of us will be dead and starved within months if not weeks, with very little individuals can do about it. The planet can always feed a couple of us, but can't feed billions if things aren't operating somewhat smoothly.
It certainly seems probable this was the case for some groups. In general though, this just seems like a view that oversimplifies human history to critique the present rather than a detached description of what we can know.
A few things AFAIK anyone has to grant about this period:
- Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived all over the world, under vastly different climates, for ~100,000 years.
- These humans were anatomically modern in every sense. They had lives every bit as complex as ours.
- Human cultural, political, and social structures are and have always been inherently diverse.
- Humans have always impacted and managed their environments for better and for worse.
- The Neolithic Revolution occurred independently in multiple places over generations as a series of choices by individuals at least roughly as intelligent as we are.
- Humans who adopted agriculture came to out-populate those who didn't.
The idea that hunter-gatherers lived consistently affluent lives and enjoyed plenty of leisure time as a general rule doesn't neatly fit this picture for me. How is it more likely than the idea that these people lived basically evenly along a spectrum of fluctuating and diverse conditions, at the mercy and grace of natural systems and social trends?
Perhaps depending on the context some human groups lucked into a life of luxury, while others lived painful lives consumed by the anxiety of dwindling supplies, all as an accident of climate patterns, the spread of disease, or even human-caused overconsumption.
Even in early societies that won a Garden of Eden in the geographic lottery, what's more human than to invent new complex problems to stew over based on generational trauma, or simply wild speculation about a world we will always have limited understanding of? Perhaps some group of humans highly valued their downtime hobbies while others were obsessed with arbitrary hierarchies, wars to obtain slaves, or settling petty disputes between powerful families.
Agriculture at the very least provided predictable trade-offs that smooth out the previous extremes, and we can't know if on balance it was a strictly negative or positive change. Since then, however, I think it's safe to say that the lives of everyone I know is better off than a practitioner of early agriculture.
One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer. It would have been especially horrific if you broke your foot or leg and weren't able to do anything about it.
Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
How many broken teeth did you just suffer with for the rest of your life? Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Mosquitos carried pathogens, the other food sources were also of random quality.
If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I could keep going on, but the point is, being a self-aware mammal would have been absolutely torturous.
> One broken limb or scratch would likely mean you're not going to live much longer.
Yes, people back then suffered a lot of broken bones, even fractured skulls. But just like their bones tell that story, we also know that they often survived those injuries and their broken bones (and even skulls!) healed. People lived in groups and cared for injured.
Also a scratch is probably not going to kill you. It could, but likely won't.
> Also, children were easy food, and women definitely died in childbirth.
Going after the children of an organized group of apex predators is probably not going to end well for the attackers.
And yes, sometimes women died in childbirth, but not that often (otherwise you wouldn't be here to type that). Also there's still a decent risk of that if you live in the US.
> Scurvy wasn't just a disorder that was tied to long ship travel.
Extremely rare on a hunter-gatherer diet. Our ancestors lost the ability to produce their own vitamin C internally millions of years ago, because they just didn't need it. Most other mammals still can.
> Mosquitos carried pathogens
Human-adapted mosquitos hadn't evolved to the degree they have today, so bites would have been much rarer, but pathogens causing fun diseases such as malaria did already exist.
> the other food sources were also of random quality.
You mean the food sources we evolved to consume? Are you talking about parasites? Most of the nasty ones really only started becoming an issue when humans gave them breeding grounds in their settlements.
> If you were born with poor eyesight or hearing, too bad.
I guess?
> I could keep going on,
Please don't. You are clearly just guessing and making stuff up as you go.
That said, of course hunter-gatherer life was much riskier than modern life, but that was just their normal. Hedonic adapation and all that.
The dog probably as well - and both horses and dogs are similar to people in that they are great at traversing long distances.
Horses also have semi similar more specialized analogues - you could argue Camels filled a similar niche for very dry areas. And other animals like Goats/Llamas/Alpacas for mountainous areas.
Fire, pets, electronic chips, all advanced human civilisation step by step in different stages. It's hard to estimate the relative importance of each.
Speaking so generally, the ancient Greeks noted that all these are means for achieving higher goals. How many people think about that today? Quantity is not followed by quality.
It was the cat, those little fluffy bastards walked into a human camp about 10,000 years ago and kicked everything off. That's why the Ancient Egyptians revered cats as Gods /s
Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.
Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.
Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.
It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.
And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...
There are certain personalities that are often attributed to modern sources, but haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte) living in a shack that has a predilection to collect herbs/mine rocks/watch the skies/you name it, that isn't thought much of or seems productive until someone gets sick/needs ore/wants to know the weather/etc?
All that said, what did crazy cat people do before cats???
> haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)
I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.
Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.
> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.
Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.
We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!
>pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling
It's more a pop culture artefact than accepted science. Original idea of paleolithic abundancy was made in sixties by rather artsy approach to the data collected in modern Kalahari. Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
Which, taking into account that their chores were quite physically demanding, makes a less rosy picture. That's not even mentioning that however primitive were Kalahari experiences of in the middle of XX century, they are unlikely to be fully representative of paleolithic state of affairs in e.g. Northern Eurasia.
That said they probably socialized more than us for many reasons, just not instead of work.
> Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.
Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.
Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.
I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.
That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.
In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.
Can you imagine how many grass grazing animals would have been just standing around waiting to be eaten? During the Pleistocene, some regions supported huge, stable herds of grazing megafauna that could provide reliable food. You just needed some friends to help you hunt. In areas with relatively mild climates and predictable seasons, people likely experienced long stretches, even generations, of comparatively low stress and easy resources. Granted, life could quickly become difficult when climate, animal populations, or competition shifted.
Most hunter-gatherer tribes had exactly that: time to just be. Their lives weren't governed by this rat race to always move up. Except for the harshest circumstances, they probably worked only 15 hours a week. Of course their play was partially training for that work, but I think in many ways, they lived more relaxing lives than we do.
Work, disease, etc only really became a thing with the agricultural revolution. It was great for population numbers, but is increasingly seen as bad for individuals. People lived shorter lives, had shorter bodies, and were more subject to disease after the agricultural revolution.
I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.
I'd bet that a lot of that in-camp work didn't feel excessively laborious when it was done while socialising within your group, and without a sense of "wish I was playing video games". Sitting around a camp fire now whittling away at something is more mucking around than chore.
Sure sitting around a campfire and whittling away at something now feels more like mucking about than chore, because it is. You don’t actually need whatever it is you’re whittling. It would probably be less relaxing if your survival depended on your handiwork.
On the upside they weren't stressed about the new "Grunt Hunt" models by Neanderthalic, which are likely take away all of the entry-level hunting jobs in the tribe.
I think about this a lot. How much anxiety do most people feel from the millions of options that are available to them daily, or young adults that are told they can be anything they want, but clam up and choose to do nothing instead.
Most people don't have millions of options available to them daily, at least not in any meaningful sense. Anxiety and choice paralysis is very much a first world privilege.
I think rope, twine, and weaving needs to be recognized as significant technical development. That has little record but would have been combined with wood for simple machines.
> Then at some unknown point probably in the last 100,000 years, the bow and arrow.
The atlatl was undoubtedly earlier, and a bigger advance. It essentially doubled a hunter's arm length, and thus impelled speed - with force proportional to the square of speed. An atlatl can put a dart straight through an enemy's gut, or easily pierce a deer's hide.
There seems a bit of an acceleration ~ 50-100k years from evolving brains similar to modern ones to agriculture, ~8k year from there to writing, ~4k to the printing press, ~400 till computers, ~40 till the web and so on. Each of those has kind of speeded intellectual progress and AI will probably be another speeding up.
A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.
Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.
Yeah when you read it in Dune "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing". sounds super cool and badass and like totally brilliant strategy but in real life not so much.
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it, but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive.
Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.
I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I could probably have made that more explicitly.
Not sure sterilisation lasts long on earth: life re-claims sterilised areas.
See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
(The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But life has re-conquered everything there.)
It might be worth noting that the number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is very low (2 perhaps?). But there have been hundreds of thousands of birth defects in its wake.
The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad time, but humanity would survive.
None of this is to suggest we should be careless about it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.
> Then about 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution, which probably unlocked much of the subsequent technological progress by enabling more food security and larger populations.
It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough
This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.
What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.
We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
It is interesting precisely because we know it wasn’t smallpox and we know it killed a large portion of the native population in places like Mexico. 1545 was just the first year the disease was documented by Europeans. There have been a dozen epidemics of this into the 19th century and then it just disappeared, long before smallpox was eradicated. It also didn’t spread indiscriminately across North America, it was correlated with specific types of environments.
The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.
You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.
We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.
Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.
You're making a fair point. Any native pathogens would have been shipped back to Europe with slave populations.
The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic population decline suggests that either that didn't happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans already had immunity.
Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in wide circulation (far more likely).
That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer.
I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.
There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when the first ever case was has proven more difficult.
I think the thing to consider isn't really if the conquering of the Americas to some degree wouldn't have happened, but if a larger population would have changed or slowed the interactions between Europe and the Americas in various ways.
It’s impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a century longer because their numbers were higher, they might have had time to start up their own production of technology.
The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.
Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden.
In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.
Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.
Once you've worked out a good way to leach out the tannins, acorns actually become a really useful food. There are a variety of possible methods - boiling, prolonged immersion in running water, or repeated mashing and rinsing cycles.
The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability.
Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth.
They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.
The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.
There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.
Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.
Ah weird - the text of the page says Atahualpa had 80k troops, but then the infobox describes the Inca forces as 3-8k in size. I guess not all the 80k were involved in the battle
Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.
They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.
American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.
The Americas were always going to be behind Euro Asia due to the shape of the continents. Going North-South you get big changes in climate and thus agricultural techniques and plants. Civilizations in the Americas could have spent thousands of years in a grow and bust cycle and never reach a similar level of development as the old continent.
The East-West thing probably does confer an advantage, but it might be overstated. I'm not sure that the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesopotamia and Europe was actually any smaller than the difference in required agricultural techniques between Mesoamerica and North America.
Yes they did, they had wheeled toys. They just didn't have a use for the wheel for transportation because of poor terrain, lack of pneumatic tires, and a lack of beasts of burden.
Everyone gets caught up in the wheel thing, but how many people have tried rolling a non-pneumatic tire loaded with weight up mountains or even just across broken terrain? We still got people carrying fridges and shit on their back up mountains in Nepal because wheels are still not useful on that terrain. Not to mention something we think of as old like the wagon wheel is the culmination of over 1000 years of innovation.
Llamas were used for some logistics, but they're not the most sturdy, modern Llamas can carry around ~40kg but I'm unsure if it would've been higher or lower with the breeds they used back then. Either way, better than nothing, but definitely no horse.
What do you mean they didn't have an advanced civilization? They had city densities above the best in Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts, armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.
Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas in this way.
Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded.
Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.
It's just objectively true that the Native Americans were far behind Europe in military technology and many other technologies in 1492. The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
> The person you're replying to never implied that the Natives were stupid savages.
They did. Natives didn't have agriculture:
> It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
Commenter upthread said they "did not invent it quickly enough", as you quoted, which is not the same thing as "did not invent it". They just meant that the Native Americans invented it later than the Europeans did, such that the natives had less time to develop advanced (military) technology.
He wasn't claiming that the Native Americans didn't have agriculture, he was claiming that Native Americans didn't develop large-scale agriculture as early in history as Eurasians did, and as a result had less time to develop the kinds of technologies that are enabled by having large-scale agriculture.
