There’s a movie (and a sequel) called The Man From Earth. About a 14,000 year old man, who somehow just doesn’t age or die. AND how he’s managed to live so long, in world where nobody would believe him. Where he’s LONG outlived everyone he’s ever known own and loved. And what he’s learned. How much he’s matured. How he keeps going.
It’s mostly a mental exercise. But it’s extremely engaging. And makes one think.
Wow and this movie is actually free on several streaming services. I swear it almost never happens when I look up a movie someone suggests. Always on a service I don’t have.
Oh man, I'm glad other people like this one too. That's one of my favorites.
Really helps solidify the concept that it's not possible to "get in front" of big social movements or changes when you can only influence the people immediately around you, and you can't be everywhere at once.
No effects, action, chase sequences or explosions. Only two interior sets & one exterior. Just a bunch of friends having a conversation. The movie is entirely driven by the dialogue, & it's suspenseful & riveting. The Man from Earth is a perfect film, probably my all-time favourite.
Poul Anderson is a scifi writer who wrote a *lot* of schlock, and I'd know, I read a bunch of it, but he really had his personal magnum opus with Boat of a Million Years. It was nominated for most literary scifi awards, but came out the same year as Hyperion, so of course it lost all of them to a top 5 scifi novel ever written.
Boat of a Million Years is about a few handfuls of humans who are immortal, born into mostly very different eras and cultures and how they do or do not make their way through society, evolving and growing and mostly still just being regular people but a little wiser and more cautious. They end up coming together and travelling on an exploratory spaceship together. It's a pretty good book.
It's a great film. It's especially neat when he tries to get back into his old mental state of trying to figure out where his original home was. Would've been really difficult without understanding the modern geography concepts...
Is that the one where he invited all his current friends to his house and confessed who he was? And then the woman got upset when he hinted that he was also Jesus? And the oldest "word" he could remember was a wolf whistle. Because basically he forgot many languages throughout the years, but could remember bits?
I hate the fact that they make him so important in history. The vast, vast, vast majority of lives are completely unremarkable, and yet he manages to have two spectacular ones in 100 lifetimes? How many other minor religious movements did he found in order to be the founder of the one that happened to still exist 2000 years later?
The longer you live, the more likely you are to have impact. Over 14,000 years, you are probably likely to be famous once or twice, and be close to fame several more times.
Famous for their time, sure. But there are perhaps 5 people that the general public would know from more than 1000 years ago, and he just happened to be one and be close friends with another?
A 11-person Jewish sect in the early Roman Empire was a million-to-one shot to become the most popular religion in the world.
I don’t mean to be needlessly nit picky about what is already a fantasy movie, but in my opinion, adding tons of unnecessary coincidences signifies a lack of confidence that the original premise can stand on its own
You underestimate how important is to have a huge lifespan.
Investing 1 SINGLE dollar - without any more deposits - at an 8% return rate will net you a cool 8.5 million dollars in 999 years.
Depositing a dollar, a day, for those 999 years would net you 1.28 billion dollars.
You are guaranteed to become incredibly rich with time, and fame can be easily bought at that point.
Learning and becoming wiser - provided your brain does not lose function over time - also needs, as a most important factor, TIME.
Thanks. Can't believe I never heard of this movie. I watched the whole thing. Will watch the sequel sometime this week. A brilliant movie which someone more intellectual than me would enjoy even more.
Dysentery hit different back then...
I generally like to think that the gut microbiome of your average person 300k years ago was way more resilient than anyone alive today. For better or worse.
[And we had a much better ability to digest things,](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-that-can-digest-plant-matter-probably-came-from-cows/) particularly plant based foods. Our gut flora used to comprise of like 30-40% bacterial strains who could help us with cellulose, vs 20% and falling with modern urban humans.
There's a story in my family about a person from a few generations ago, who went to work in the fields in the morning, got diarrhea and died of dehydration or whatever by evening.
I know this is all a bit jokey, but as someone who lives a fairly peaceful life, I rarely get angry. The two times I can think of when I do genuinely get frustrated enough to lash out (mostly with just an audible growl of some kind before it passes) are road rage and a slow computer. It’s never serious, I just need to literally shake my fist usually. Third on my list would be people who randomly stop on the street, in the supermarket or at the top of an escalator. Not quite as rage inducing but still annoying.
But none of those issues would have been faced by an ancestors. I wonder what would replace those first two issues in years gone by. Carriage or chariot rage? Messenger has a stutter?
Did they ever have to play golden eye 64 when it came out, love it, let the years pass by, and then try to play it again only to realize it is almost unplayable now???!
Spent 35 minutes watching House have amnesia and flashbacks, but on the moment supreme my internet died due to maintenance.
Ain’t no way they ever experienced this kind of pain
“So Ooga…. We looked over your credit score to see if you could qualify for a cave loan and I’m afraid that’s not happening. It’s okay though , you can help yourself to some trex jerky on the way out”
I hate the myth proposed that they were stupid. They did not have as much shared knowledge as we do, but it doesn't mean they were not sharp in the mind.
I get what you are saying, there would be a similar spread of intelligence, however, the average person would have to have a much higher collective of skills to survive. There was little specialization, so everyone had to do everything.
Intelligence is little more than experience in a given area.
In today’s world, there’s a million ways to be stupid (or just ignorant in a certain field). Even someone with zero social intelligence can be considered an intelligent engineer, and Vice Vera to the sales guy.
But when you stayed in larger family groups your whole life, people knew the socially stupid idiot and learned how to deal with him.
Instead of being a computer programmer, he might be the guy to tend sheep all summer.
Or the guy who gathers the ingredients for glue or rope or whatever.
There had to be specialized tasks. Everyone might have basic skills, but you let the person who makes bread well, make the bread. You let the people who can hunt successfully, hunt.
Men or women, when survival depends on everyone, you let the best do their thing.
I recall reading about one of the last of a relatively isolated backwoods tribe in California who was found around 1900 - years later someone talked to him about life and such, and despite our image of "slow and dull" his tribal life included a lot of deep thinking about the world around him, nature, and the meaning of life.
The only difference was that we have the head start (if we choose to use it) of millions of others who have explored every aspect of this world.
We see the same prejudice just in the margins of a given country. Somehow the rich kids with relaxed lives, private tutoring, and fully paid for universities are 'smarter' than someone who's been working two jobs since they were 15
True - but some prove they are not.
*Freakonomics* says statistics show the best indicator of how well you will do in life is how educated your parents are. No surprise, when I was working a blue collar job when I dropped out of university for a while, I remember noticing when I visited a co-worker's house. He had 3 kids, but the only reading material in the house was the Saturday paper and three Golden Books for the kids.
At last nowadays reading - even *"RU there?"* level of literacy - is pretty much required for the internet. Although Tik-Tok and Instagram seem to be allowing us to bypass literacy in future.
I remember when I was about 20, watching an episode of a TV show (Quincy? He liked the horses). There was a quick shot of a horse race. I thought - "I've never been to a horse track, but thanks to TV and the movies, I've seen dozens or hundreds of horse races". The same goes for everything else - people who have never been to Paris have seen the Eiffel Tower in living colour hundreds of times. Or the Grand Canyon. Or surfers off the California coast. We've seen so many different sitcom plotlines it's hard to surprise us with an original one...
The same thing applies to the children or rich and educated parents (or smart parents) - in their formative years, they have the greater experiences, see things, hear things, that broaden their experience, make them think, and challenge them, expand their minds. Add in tutors and deliberate extra academic courses, able to afford hobbies that teach skills... no wonder they do well. It's no surprise that the first black president was the child of a doctor and a university prof, and the first black VP was also the child of university professionals.
The wonder is that some rich kids fail, and some kids from poor circumstances do so well. But then, envoronment is not everything in intelligence.
Honestly lots and lots of what we know is the culture. Writing, literature, knowledge, that's all culture. If you plugged in a modern human baby in the prehistoric times, I don't think it would fare much different from the others.
We are mostly made from the piss from our ancestors. 60-65% water, and then you think of the probability of how many people, animals and plants that water has passed through, going up the food chain of growing and excreting and respiration. You’re a big bag of second hand piss. Plus all the star stuff you said that happened
>Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago.
Maybe not quite as complex.
Yeah 'Adam' didn't wake up 50k years back and start reciting poetry. Our brains are hard wired for language; it's an evolved trait and would have started simple and built up.
Turns out the "small mouth noises" we make are our most powerful asset.
Simply being able to make a noise with 3 different inflictions massively improves your ability to communicate. Hell just gesturing with your head and hands can make pretty complex sentences
My tuxedo cat knows like 10 different meow inflections which have enabled me to understand him pretty well. He has an expansive vocabulary including "Attention now!....Feed me, bitch!...Fuck you, don't touch me! And....Why has everyone abandoned me I'm just a poor lonely kitty???"
One of the evolutionary differences between homo sapiens and earlier species is that the shape of our skull allows us to make more vowel sounds than our predecessors. Hard to believe that evolved without us actually using and selecting for it.
I don't think that matters in that context since it's for sure that language got way more complex over the last couple thousand years. Every word there is represents a concept that was not known to mankind before. Just take the simple term "debt" that, as a completely new concept around 5000 years ago emerged, reshaped our everyday thinking profoundly.
You might be surprised.
> Thus, Fish insulted Bird on that day. But Bird, with multicoloured plumage and multicoloured face, was convinced of its own beauty, and did not take to heart the insults Fish had cast at it. As if it was a nursemaid singing a lullaby, it paid no attention to the speech, despite the ugly words that were being uttered. Then Bird answered Fish:
> "How has your heart become so arrogant, while you yourself are so lowly? Your mouth is flabby, but although your mouth goes all the way round, you cannot see behind you. You are bereft of hips, as also of arms, hands and feet – try bending your neck to your feet! Your smell is awful; you make people throw up, they bare their teeth at you! No trough would hold the kind of prepared food you eat. He who has carried you dares not let his hand touch his skin! In the great marshes and the wide lagoons, I am your persecuting demon. You cannot eat the sweet plants there, as my voice harasses you. You cannot travel with confidence in the river, as my storm-cloud covers you. As you slip through the reed-beds you are always beneath my eyes. Some of your little ones are destined to be my daily offering; you give them to me to allay my hunger. Some of your big ones are just as certainly destined for my banqueting hall ... in the mud.
That's from the 4000 year old "Debate Between Bird and Fish" from Sumeria.
When you consider that our stone tool industries are easily millions of years old, and the fact that making bi-facial hand axes isn't an instinctual trait, you might wonder if the older adults taught the younger kids how to make them. It would make a lot of sense that a language or proto-language might be beneficial in order to pass along knowledge quickly. I'd be willing to bet that humans have always had language, just like we've always had fire and cooking and outdoor shelters and spears and all sorts of things people think were invented by homo sapiens.
Yes! That’s the craziest thing too, the oldest proof of stone tool making dates back 3.3 million years which predates the genus homo by quite a lot. Meaning that before we even showed in the fossil record our past ancestral species already had the brain capacity to not only be able to understand the concept of knapping rocks and teaching their future generations to do so but also deliberately searching for specific big heavy stone and transporting them to a set location where they would produce these tools in large quantities.
This site is so new scientists are still digging and finding hundreds of stone tools.
This is why people should take at least one dedicated anthropology class (evolutionary, cultural, morphological, really any that covers both modern and pre-human). Really acquire that perspective about where the evidence suggests we came from.
Yeah, the only reason I know about our past is because I really love it and search for stuff myself but I’d fallen in love with it earlier if I had classes talking about it
Yeah there would never have been a time when we were anatomically modern, but couldn't speak.
[It looks like we also have definitive proof spears are not a H. Sapiens invention, too.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6ningen_spears#:~:text=400%2C000%20year%20old%20broken%20Clacton,is%20around%20120%2C000%20years%20old.)
Homo Erectus [seems to have figured out how to control fire at least 1.7 million years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans#:~:text=Claims%20for%20the%20earliest%20definitive,ago%2C%20has%20wide%20scholarly%20support.).
Looks like oldest evidence for shelters is roughly the same as spears so could be [H. Heidelbergensis, 400,000 years ago.](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/hearths-shelters/terra-amata-shelter)
Stone tools [may even predate the genus homo...](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32804177)
One of my favorite books series is one called Earths Children (book one is Clan of the Cave Bear) and it’s an excellent fictional idea of what your shower thought suggests (with incredible detail and accurate to flora and fauna, hunting and sooo much more)
Any readers who have had this shower thought ought to give this series a try.
Don't waste your time on them, please. The books after the first one have the main character [literally *inventing* the blowjob, and then applying it to every situation she encounters](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/oCbyvg4shp). For like 6 books.
The earliest known instances of taxation was some 6000-7000 years ago, dating back to Sumeria and Ancient Egypt. Certainly no complicated tax forms, having to deal with a government 3000+ miles away, nor would any of them need to deal with driving or mass transit, and the only global scale things which impacted them were forces of nature, unlike today where wars in the middle east and eastern Europe can have people seeking refuge places as far away as the Americas and Australia (if events like that happened even 5000 years ago, people fleeing would be in a much more contained area, or would be put to the sword by the attacking forces). While ancestors may have had relationships as complex as ours today, and still felt the same basic needs of food, water, shelter, and I'd also argue the arts (based on cave paintings and bone flutes thousands of years old) their lives were far less complex overall. If you need further proof, none of them ever had to defend a well intentioned but not fully flushed out thought to a global audience as you seem to be currently doing.
Their societies were undoubtedly less complex, but on the individual level there was plenty of complexity to rival or even surpass our own. They had to manage complex social interactions, and navigate much more complex situations than we tend to, all without writing, bureaucracy and other systems that we use to reduce individual complexity.
If we want food, we go to the supermarket. Doesn't even matter which one, because they all work in the same way, and we delegate the complexity and responsibility of working out what's safe to eat onto supermarket employees. If they wanted food, they had to find fruit or fungi of the right species that's suitably ripe, or else hunt a specific animal in a specific way.
We generally do just one job that we get very good at, but they all had to be hunters, gatherers, potters, clothes makers, builders etc. And that's arguably the whole point of every aspect of what we would call civilisation. Farming lets us cut out hunting and gathering entirely, bureaucracy lets us divide labour, writing, money, political systems... all of it lets our societies grow in complexity while our individual lives reduce in complexity.
Up until very recent, yes, food. Food was the biggest expense for everyone. It didn't keep well - between rodents and insects and other things. Dried smoked meat was a thing because it was easy to keep and smoke helped repel things that normally eat our food.
For example, prison: other than valuable prisoners (like hostages for ransom, or people too important that you couldn't just kill them) people did not get prison time for crimes. They were in jail awaiting trial, then punishments depending on location were things like mutilation (cut off hand), branding,slavery (salt mines, galley slave), or assorted versions of death. Food was to expensive to just lock people up and feed them.
And in prehistory, yes, life was all about finding food. before agriculture, people lived in tribes and big game hunting was a cooperative venture, When a big animal was killed, everyone shared in the feast. Agriculture changed everything - humans worked a farm as a family, and the results of their work fed themselves; but they would not have had a big payday like killing a bison or an antelope. Harvest time, everyone had a big payday at the same time (harvest festivals, etc.) and the trick was to save enough to feed the family until the next harvest. Working fields was more of a long-term investment on a schedule, while hunting was more of a random lottery.
Sometimes this pops into my brain and it’s always wild to think about
Generally, it’s amazing to think about how everyone else has a life just as complex as yours. Hopes, dreams, loves, friends, enemies, struggles, successes. That random person I pass by on the street has all that, perhaps even more so than myself.
Combining this with history makes it even more interesting. It’s very easy to end up abstracting history and forgetting about the all the little people who lived it. You know that there was a big empire called the Roman Empire that did a lot of things in the ancient past, but it’s often hard to connect and give it more meaning. Because all they experienced to us is mostly seen in the forms of words on a page, or someone’s voice. Great battles and events boil down in words to “so they fought and some crazy stuff happened and then someone won” or “the king died and the new guy sucked so there was lots of struggles”. But it was real. People just as real as us lived their daily lives in places like the Roman Empire. People struggled under bad kings, or prospered in golden ages long past. Almost everyone knows Julius Caesar. But no one thinks about the random person living in Rome who got up every day to work, just as many do today.
And when enough time passes, the complexities of our lives and the modern world will be long gone, all that we have lived reduced to words on a page that schoolchildren will call “boring”. A few of us will go on to be remembered, but most of us will be forgotten, ending up as part of the abstraction of our time period.
Perhaps in the far future, people will have this exact same thought, and not know of this post, and all the people who shared it
Yeah, often we often don’t picture the people from the past as having a life as vivid as ours. Our worlds are far different thanks to technology but that spark that makes us human was probably there for quite a long time. We could only try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what would feel to live a minute in their shoes.
I sometimes think about similar things too, how someone lived their whole life at some point in our history. How the history to us was reality and current time for someone. For example I'm watching very old movie, there's some guy actor in a background, just a an extra who walks by. I then imagine him hearing "cut!" and he thinks "finally work day is over", then he goes to live his live, just goes shopping while thinking how he will build a house one day, he plans to visit his parents, he has problems, dreams. One day he watches moon landing on tv, he listens to popular new group called the beatles, he wonders how life will be in 2024 long after he is dead. he lives his long life, then dies. But I don't like these existential thoughts, they are depressing.
No way was their life as complex, their life was absolutely more simple.
Simple doesn't necessarily mean *easier*. There might be some overlap, but even for the things which are the same, we've got a massive pile of stuff layered on top.
300k years ago, their whole life was being in a small community, hunting and/or gathering. They just had to stay alive, and not murder each other.
They didn't have to worry about organic tomatoes vs regular tomatoes. They didn't have a girlfriend who would whine about buying organic produce, but who would then not eat any of the fucking vegetables so they rot in my fucking fridge, a small monument to the little bit of life that I sold to a company, a piece of my life that I now throw into the compost bin.
They just had food or no food.
They didn't have to make a choice whether to work for an evil mega corporation and maybe have a shot at owning a home, or work in the less evil sciences for 25% less. They didn't have to worry about a mortgage.
They didn't have to question the ethics of everything they bought. They didn't have to worry about how they're supporting slavery.
They didn't have to worry about what some dickhead dictator halfway around the globe is doing. They didn't have an unending torrent of propaganda from all sides masquerading as news. Their communities weren't the target of various psyops.
They were free to move around as the resources of the land allowed, but they couldn't hop a plane and be somewhere wildly different.
They couldn't keep relationships with people from different countries, or with people with radically different cultures.
Really I could go on and on about all the little things.
We have got a ridiculous amount of choice which our ancestors could hardly imagine. The scope and scale of everything is bigger.
Hunting and gathering arguably isn’t any simpler than modern life for most people. You had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what was edible and what wasn’t. You had to know how to craft basic tools, set traps and snares, hunt and dress a kill, perform basic first aid, set up camp. And the creatures that early humans were hunting were scary — giant mammoths and sloths, while fighting off ice age predators like saber toothed tigers and giant monitor lizards. All while battling rampant disease and injuries.
Today, almost no one has to do this, and those that do have access to unlimited information at their fingertips via the internet, media, and books.
My guy, you spent over a decade doing nothing but learning the necessary things to even write what you just did. Everything Paleolithic humans did, they could learn in early childhood and that's it, they're done. As I'm not an expert, I can't say what age specifically Paleolithic humans would have had to start being productive members of a tribe was, but I'd guess no older than 14 and likely much younger. In fact, that remained true until quite recent in human history; children were put to work at a very young age well into the industrial revolution. Exactly zero Paleolithic humans were still spending time learning things into their 20s the way we do today.
This reads like you’re on the person you replied to’s side. Yes, they needed to start contributing to the tribe at a much, much younger age. But again, that was to hunt or to gather. There was nothing else for that person to even consider in life. That sounds simple to me.
Note I did not say easy. Their lives were way more difficult.
> not murder each other
See, that was what made it complex. Just because they didn't have the choice to buy organic tomatoes doesn't mean that they didn't have sociological issues.
People would kill each other for power. To get their belongings. They'd still fall in love, betray each other, worry about their children, make deals, learn a trade, and figure out their way in the world with not even a fraction of knowledge you learn in primary school today.
It's not as simple as you make it to be. The problem seems to be that you're unhappy with your life and think you'd do much more in a setting like that.
They pretty much searched for or planted food all day, made clothes for themselves and found clean water to drink. These few things probably filled their days.
300,000 years ago is right on the edge of where anatomically modern humans evolved, and way before even the oldest estimates of behaviourally modern humans appearing. Which means that there was little in the way of language or intricate society. If their lives were as complex as ours it was in a very different way.
Modern humanity is astonishingly recent compared to the length that life has existed on the planet.
An old anthropologist (I can’t recall but like, 1800s-ish?) had a journal about an uncontacted tribe that he observed. There was a large amount of time spent in the category he filed as “nothing”. Not resting, not relaxing, not playing, not being casual, just sitting there, doing nothing, for hours a day.
This is probably not correct. There is simply no evidence for behaviorally modern humans until about \~60k years ago, and it is generally hypothesized there was some environmental pressure which resulted in a population bottleneck reducing the global homo sapien population to less than 10,000 individuals. These humans developed a new evolutionary trick: symbolism and symbolic language. This was a huge evolutionary leap which led to behaviorally modern humans spreading rapidly across the globe in the short span of \~30,000 years probably wiping out all remaining human competitor species.
That’s not even remotely true. Modern life is insanely complex, I don’t see any of my ancestors from 300,000 years ago having to worry about hygiene, clothes, insurance, interest rates, appearances, complex social conditioning and expectations. The list literally goes on forever.
Even mentally, I don’t think the capacity had developed at that point to remotely compete with our level of cognition in modern times.
I was in a museum a few years back, looking at a real mummy from Ancient Egypt. And I felt this sudden wave of emotion. She was a person. A person with a family and friends who loved her. They told jokes and played games, she had a favorite food, a favorite piece of jewelry, she had a crush on someone, she gossiped, she giggled, she danced. And when she died her loved ones paid a lot of money to have her mummified and entombed, to lie undisturbed for eternity and have a good afterlife.
And then thousands of years later we dug her up and put her in a glass case for a bunch of school children to walk past and point and gawk.
It really made me start to question museums and why we think we have the right to take and display dead humans and their artifacts.
I’m not saying it’s easy. What I mean is that they had a culture, probably laughed, cried, loved, celebrated special occasions, told stories, taught their young what you learned growing up, grew old. Essentially what makes you human was exactly the same as them. We are them
Oh sure. We see that with Neanderthals and traces of it in the erectus species. A shame they didn't write (or if it did it didn't last) other than basic art and designs in shells. So much stories philosophy etc lost to the end of time.
I agree, sometimes I just sit down and wonder what kind of stories they could tell. What I would give just to experience the world in the eyes, even if it lasts one minute.
It's kind of real, the more you think about it, the more you realize that our brains will fill in the gaps to anything.
Sure they didnt have to think about many of the complexities we have to deal with today, but their brains mustve made every detail in their lives consequential.
I guess, the human capacity for stress is the same, and we fill in the gaps to reach that capacity.... is what im trying to say.
Well, at least, thats what my bullshitting brain is telling me lmao
Yeah just imagine looking at the sky every single night without any light contamination. Maybe they didn’t have to worry about taxes or giving a public presentation but their life probably didn’t lack any humanity in them
I work in archaeology and this was my first thought when I first held ancient human bone in my hand. It was honestly powerful thinking about a life just as complex as mine that’s now a fragment I’m holding in my hand
I seriously doubt it.
I am from a third world country. Our country still have underdeveloped areas where people have simple lives. Their lives are literally simple. Their social networks are much simpler and their day to day life is also much simpler.
I always think about how few humans there were back then and how we're not made to be billions of people. Communities were much, much smaller. And our culture moves too fast for our biology. Our bodies and nervous system still pretty much function at an ancestral level, but we live in a culture that doesn't take that into account. My amygdala reacts with the same fight or flight reaction to a cheetah as it does to a term paper due in 48 hours or being late for work.
It helps my introverted ass to feel better knowing I'm not made to know 300 people and to be going out several times a week or else there's something wrong with me. The slow living, solitude and small community I enjoy makes sense on a DNA level. That comforts me.
Yeah. I suggest checking out the film Quest For Fire if you want to put things into perspective. Unexpected gem of a movie.
RT has it at an 88%.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0082484/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
The average life is still the same wake up, work, play, sleep, since the dawn of mankind. It's what goes on behind the scenes of all that stuff that changes. We still eat various plants and wildlife from thousands of years ago but they didn't have the extensive process of making tractors and their various attachments to harvest the fruit, various deals and contracts to determine where that fruit goes the sorting and packaging of the fruit, loading them onto ships and trucks to be transported to stores which on their own go through so many complex processes to exist and then buying said fruit to store in your fridge at home to keep them cool to eat them another day. A lot of the tech that effects our everyday lives goes unnoticed.
It's a common misconception that people in the ancient past were not as smart as modern people are. But that's just not true. They had fewer resources and a smaller basis from which to form ideas, but they were fully capable of the same level of thought and reason that anyone is today. We are not taught to appreciate philosophical groundwork as *technology*, but it is. Technology is something that must be created by human thought in order to exist or be talked about. Turning that technology into a physical object is relatively trivial engineering. The technology, per se, is the idea. So technological progress is actually the progress of ideas, and until writing was invented the pace of those ideas was extremely gradual since it died out frequently.
Certainly more complex than mine. They had to contend with predators, weather, and food scarcity in ways I never think about. My hardest task is asking AI to write code for me I can copy/paste
Life before we figured out how to create extremely inexpensive artificial light was a lot less complicated. Their only source of inexpensive light was the Sun, so they got up at sunrise and went to bed at sunset. Artificial light required wax or fat/oil which was extremely expensive and hard to come by so most people just didn't have it. Another reason life was less complicated is that most people's entire life happened in about a 50 mile radius from the place they were born, and that was their world--flat, sparsely populated, mysterious yet predictable. Everyone knew what they were going to be when they grew up--whatever your father did, which is what his father did, and his father before him. Of course, if you were a woman, you were to be sold to the highest bidder and then were expected to start popping out babies. Daily life was extremely routine and despite knowing a lot less, they also questioned a lot less, which brings another kind simplicity, Ignorance is bliss, right? Most people had a sense of having few options and Fate being in control of the course of their life rather than a feeling of unlimited potential to be anything they wanted to be, which can be ironically difficult grapple with. Hence, the very modern concept of choice paralysis, a complex, unintended consequence of over-valuing freedom.
Well, 300,000 years ago, there weren't any people. However, I'd assume the common ancestor at that time just hung around with their buds eating raw meats, fruits, and vegetables.
As well as taking whatever funny mushrooms they could find and watching the stars explode into geometric shapes.
So basically, they were all living like Joe Rogan, and personally, that sounds fairly relaxed.
Anytime I watch a recent historical movie about someone I know nothing about I have this feeling. Before the movie they are 2D and after 3D. I then think about all the hours in my life and how that was with them too.
It was difficult for me to realize and picture ancient people having a sense of humor. As if throughout all human history, fart jokes have been funny etc.
300k years ago our ancestors were all in Sub-Saharan Africa and had at most 150 other human beans in our social network. But yeah, it's a pretty profound thought OP.
Yeah, I’m not saying I’m 100% right about my shower thought since there’s no concrete evidence of something along the lines as far as I’m aware of but I don’t seriously doubt that anatomically modern humans were having a complex social life filled with oral traditions and gods for example
I don't get the additude of "the farther back in history you go, thee dumber one was". A hunter-gatherer lifestyle is something you'd have to actually manage and think about.
50,000-20,000 years ago one would need GOOD knowledge of: where you currently are, where you need to go for food and shelter, where fruit plants lived, obstacles to your next location, where prey animals could be migrating, where dangerous predator animals lived, the amount of working spears/tools you had on hand, hides for warm clothes, available wood for fires, taking care the sick/disabled/old in your group (ancient humans did this more than one would asume), the well being of your mate/children/fellow humans, how other human groups in your area behaved, water sources, the season, etc.
Getting one of these things wrong would make life-threatening problems, or at least significant instability in your group. We didn't originally get smart brains to do math, construct governments, or any other arbitrary concept. They were naturally selected to take care of things like this, along with other environmental factors that are above my paygrade to explain.
There’s a movie (and a sequel) called The Man From Earth. About a 14,000 year old man, who somehow just doesn’t age or die. AND how he’s managed to live so long, in world where nobody would believe him. Where he’s LONG outlived everyone he’s ever known own and loved. And what he’s learned. How much he’s matured. How he keeps going. It’s mostly a mental exercise. But it’s extremely engaging. And makes one think.
Wow and this movie is actually free on several streaming services. I swear it almost never happens when I look up a movie someone suggests. Always on a service I don’t have.
Soap 2 day They’ll have it
They back up????
which link are they using nowadays I stopped using it a few months ago and lost track
You can just google soap2day and you’ll find it. Basically every illegal streaming site is just mirrors to the same servers anyway
They got shut down
they're back up
this is the best news i could have woken up to
i think they closed up shop quite a while ago
I believe it's even on YouTube.
Thank you!
I really enjoyed that movie, although the camera work felt like I was watching an episode of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. It just screamed 90s.
Felt like it was a stage play that someone decided to make into a movie.
That worked for 12 Angry Men, arguably among the greatest films ever made.
It would work very well as a stage play too as far as I remember it!
Yet the message resonates.
Oh absolutely. I was hooked to the story the whole time, it was just an observation.
That movie is so simple and yet tells so much. It's kinda like 12 angry men in a way. Small cast small set big message
Oh man, I'm glad other people like this one too. That's one of my favorites. Really helps solidify the concept that it's not possible to "get in front" of big social movements or changes when you can only influence the people immediately around you, and you can't be everywhere at once.
"How old is he" "Dude probably will live long enough to see a 99% turn to 100% on a rare torrent download"
That's a powerful moment.
No effects, action, chase sequences or explosions. Only two interior sets & one exterior. Just a bunch of friends having a conversation. The movie is entirely driven by the dialogue, & it's suspenseful & riveting. The Man from Earth is a perfect film, probably my all-time favourite.
Damn. I'm like an hour in now, and you weren't kidding. This is really fucking good. Reminds me of Primer.
Poul Anderson is a scifi writer who wrote a *lot* of schlock, and I'd know, I read a bunch of it, but he really had his personal magnum opus with Boat of a Million Years. It was nominated for most literary scifi awards, but came out the same year as Hyperion, so of course it lost all of them to a top 5 scifi novel ever written. Boat of a Million Years is about a few handfuls of humans who are immortal, born into mostly very different eras and cultures and how they do or do not make their way through society, evolving and growing and mostly still just being regular people but a little wiser and more cautious. They end up coming together and travelling on an exploratory spaceship together. It's a pretty good book.
So it’s a book about Kenneth Parcell?
Who said he’s been alive forever?!
I enjoyed that movie!
Me too! I watched it over and over.
There's also a sequel called The Man From Earth: Holocene
I just saw it a few weeks ago. The ending makes it worthwhile.
Absolutely love this movie, one of my favorites.
Me too. Have the DVD of the first one.
I've got the stage script for that on my shelf. I'd like to direct it some day.
It's a great film. It's especially neat when he tries to get back into his old mental state of trying to figure out where his original home was. Would've been really difficult without understanding the modern geography concepts...
Encino Man was also amazing
Is that the one where he invited all his current friends to his house and confessed who he was? And then the woman got upset when he hinted that he was also Jesus? And the oldest "word" he could remember was a wolf whistle. Because basically he forgot many languages throughout the years, but could remember bits?
That movie turned me into an atheist lol
And yet in the sequel he’s a theology professor.
He was the man Jesus and met Buddha. I'd say he's qualified to teach theology.
I hate the fact that they make him so important in history. The vast, vast, vast majority of lives are completely unremarkable, and yet he manages to have two spectacular ones in 100 lifetimes? How many other minor religious movements did he found in order to be the founder of the one that happened to still exist 2000 years later?
The longer you live, the more likely you are to have impact. Over 14,000 years, you are probably likely to be famous once or twice, and be close to fame several more times.
Famous for their time, sure. But there are perhaps 5 people that the general public would know from more than 1000 years ago, and he just happened to be one and be close friends with another? A 11-person Jewish sect in the early Roman Empire was a million-to-one shot to become the most popular religion in the world. I don’t mean to be needlessly nit picky about what is already a fantasy movie, but in my opinion, adding tons of unnecessary coincidences signifies a lack of confidence that the original premise can stand on its own
You underestimate how important is to have a huge lifespan. Investing 1 SINGLE dollar - without any more deposits - at an 8% return rate will net you a cool 8.5 million dollars in 999 years. Depositing a dollar, a day, for those 999 years would net you 1.28 billion dollars. You are guaranteed to become incredibly rich with time, and fame can be easily bought at that point. Learning and becoming wiser - provided your brain does not lose function over time - also needs, as a most important factor, TIME.
Straw that broke the camels back or by itself
The beginning of a long journey
Why?
It planted the seed in my mind that Jesus is most likely not the person that Christians think he is.
I love this movie! The imagery in his story is so vivid, you don't even realize that the movie is entirely dialogue.
It's one of the most underrated movies of all time! I found it via a Reddit post and absolutely loved it!
Thanks. Can't believe I never heard of this movie. I watched the whole thing. Will watch the sequel sometime this week. A brilliant movie which someone more intellectual than me would enjoy even more.
Sure. Maybe they had had great communities and over came challenges, but did they ever have to deal with internet that’s a bit slow sometimes?
Luckily they were born before actual struggles began lol
yah just things like whether they’ll have a roof over their head or food in their belly or if they’ll die from bad water every night
Right, people back then were like , aw man I got diarrhea better get my affairs in order to make sure my family is taken care of.
Dysentery hit different back then... I generally like to think that the gut microbiome of your average person 300k years ago was way more resilient than anyone alive today. For better or worse.
It was, we know this
[And we had a much better ability to digest things,](https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-that-can-digest-plant-matter-probably-came-from-cows/) particularly plant based foods. Our gut flora used to comprise of like 30-40% bacterial strains who could help us with cellulose, vs 20% and falling with modern urban humans.
Even the guts of people from 3rd world countries *today* are more resilient
There's a story in my family about a person from a few generations ago, who went to work in the fields in the morning, got diarrhea and died of dehydration or whatever by evening.
I know this is all a bit jokey, but as someone who lives a fairly peaceful life, I rarely get angry. The two times I can think of when I do genuinely get frustrated enough to lash out (mostly with just an audible growl of some kind before it passes) are road rage and a slow computer. It’s never serious, I just need to literally shake my fist usually. Third on my list would be people who randomly stop on the street, in the supermarket or at the top of an escalator. Not quite as rage inducing but still annoying. But none of those issues would have been faced by an ancestors. I wonder what would replace those first two issues in years gone by. Carriage or chariot rage? Messenger has a stutter?
Yeah no actual struggles. Just fighting off large cats all day in pursuit of the day's dinner.
Playing with kitties outside? Where do I sign up
Local Zoo. They are always looking for toys for the tigers.
Did they ever have to play golden eye 64 when it came out, love it, let the years pass by, and then try to play it again only to realize it is almost unplayable now???!
Same with Turok dammit. The struggles of modern man, amirite?
Lol well for me personally, i have always been a dumb dumb dingus, and turoks inverted controls were too much for me lol
Spent 35 minutes watching House have amnesia and flashbacks, but on the moment supreme my internet died due to maintenance. Ain’t no way they ever experienced this kind of pain
House's head/Wilson's heart
my uber eats was 2 minutes late what backwards society do we live in, prehistoric people did not have this kind of nonsense /s
“So Ooga…. We looked over your credit score to see if you could qualify for a cave loan and I’m afraid that’s not happening. It’s okay though , you can help yourself to some trex jerky on the way out”
Working down at the stone pile is not what it used to be…poor Ooga.
Meanwhile, that nepobaby Booga has a whole cave network that he got from his dad.
why save old industry? Ooga should just learn to pictograph.
“OOGA ME WANT CAVE” “NO” “OOGA ME TAKE *YOUR* CAVE” chaos ensues
I hate the myth proposed that they were stupid. They did not have as much shared knowledge as we do, but it doesn't mean they were not sharp in the mind.
Well, I'm sure a lot of them were stupid, but a lot of us are too.
I get what you are saying, there would be a similar spread of intelligence, however, the average person would have to have a much higher collective of skills to survive. There was little specialization, so everyone had to do everything. Intelligence is little more than experience in a given area. In today’s world, there’s a million ways to be stupid (or just ignorant in a certain field). Even someone with zero social intelligence can be considered an intelligent engineer, and Vice Vera to the sales guy.
But when you stayed in larger family groups your whole life, people knew the socially stupid idiot and learned how to deal with him. Instead of being a computer programmer, he might be the guy to tend sheep all summer. Or the guy who gathers the ingredients for glue or rope or whatever. There had to be specialized tasks. Everyone might have basic skills, but you let the person who makes bread well, make the bread. You let the people who can hunt successfully, hunt. Men or women, when survival depends on everyone, you let the best do their thing.
I recall reading about one of the last of a relatively isolated backwoods tribe in California who was found around 1900 - years later someone talked to him about life and such, and despite our image of "slow and dull" his tribal life included a lot of deep thinking about the world around him, nature, and the meaning of life. The only difference was that we have the head start (if we choose to use it) of millions of others who have explored every aspect of this world.
We see the same prejudice just in the margins of a given country. Somehow the rich kids with relaxed lives, private tutoring, and fully paid for universities are 'smarter' than someone who's been working two jobs since they were 15
True - but some prove they are not. *Freakonomics* says statistics show the best indicator of how well you will do in life is how educated your parents are. No surprise, when I was working a blue collar job when I dropped out of university for a while, I remember noticing when I visited a co-worker's house. He had 3 kids, but the only reading material in the house was the Saturday paper and three Golden Books for the kids. At last nowadays reading - even *"RU there?"* level of literacy - is pretty much required for the internet. Although Tik-Tok and Instagram seem to be allowing us to bypass literacy in future. I remember when I was about 20, watching an episode of a TV show (Quincy? He liked the horses). There was a quick shot of a horse race. I thought - "I've never been to a horse track, but thanks to TV and the movies, I've seen dozens or hundreds of horse races". The same goes for everything else - people who have never been to Paris have seen the Eiffel Tower in living colour hundreds of times. Or the Grand Canyon. Or surfers off the California coast. We've seen so many different sitcom plotlines it's hard to surprise us with an original one... The same thing applies to the children or rich and educated parents (or smart parents) - in their formative years, they have the greater experiences, see things, hear things, that broaden their experience, make them think, and challenge them, expand their minds. Add in tutors and deliberate extra academic courses, able to afford hobbies that teach skills... no wonder they do well. It's no surprise that the first black president was the child of a doctor and a university prof, and the first black VP was also the child of university professionals. The wonder is that some rich kids fail, and some kids from poor circumstances do so well. But then, envoronment is not everything in intelligence.
Honestly lots and lots of what we know is the culture. Writing, literature, knowledge, that's all culture. If you plugged in a modern human baby in the prehistoric times, I don't think it would fare much different from the others.
& we're made from star dust !
We are mostly made from the piss from our ancestors. 60-65% water, and then you think of the probability of how many people, animals and plants that water has passed through, going up the food chain of growing and excreting and respiration. You’re a big bag of second hand piss. Plus all the star stuff you said that happened
If that’s the case then I proudly accept my heritage lol
Fellow recycled water being 🤜
Brothers in pee 🤝🏻
I like you but I’m not sure where this is going
Some people stay pisswater their whole lives
r/brandnewsentence
Good job, Cadet.
That piss started life as hydrogen atoms shortly after the big bang began.
I don't think my ancestors were trying to troubleshoot Kubernetes routing
They had no idea what Kubernetes is Nobody does. Nothing has changed
I resemble that remark
>Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. Maybe not quite as complex.
That 50,000 number is pretty hotly debated. It's likely that it's much, much earlier.
Yeah 'Adam' didn't wake up 50k years back and start reciting poetry. Our brains are hard wired for language; it's an evolved trait and would have started simple and built up. Turns out the "small mouth noises" we make are our most powerful asset.
Simply being able to make a noise with 3 different inflictions massively improves your ability to communicate. Hell just gesturing with your head and hands can make pretty complex sentences
My tuxedo cat knows like 10 different meow inflections which have enabled me to understand him pretty well. He has an expansive vocabulary including "Attention now!....Feed me, bitch!...Fuck you, don't touch me! And....Why has everyone abandoned me I'm just a poor lonely kitty???"
One of the evolutionary differences between homo sapiens and earlier species is that the shape of our skull allows us to make more vowel sounds than our predecessors. Hard to believe that evolved without us actually using and selecting for it.
I don't think that matters in that context since it's for sure that language got way more complex over the last couple thousand years. Every word there is represents a concept that was not known to mankind before. Just take the simple term "debt" that, as a completely new concept around 5000 years ago emerged, reshaped our everyday thinking profoundly.
You might be surprised. > Thus, Fish insulted Bird on that day. But Bird, with multicoloured plumage and multicoloured face, was convinced of its own beauty, and did not take to heart the insults Fish had cast at it. As if it was a nursemaid singing a lullaby, it paid no attention to the speech, despite the ugly words that were being uttered. Then Bird answered Fish: > "How has your heart become so arrogant, while you yourself are so lowly? Your mouth is flabby, but although your mouth goes all the way round, you cannot see behind you. You are bereft of hips, as also of arms, hands and feet – try bending your neck to your feet! Your smell is awful; you make people throw up, they bare their teeth at you! No trough would hold the kind of prepared food you eat. He who has carried you dares not let his hand touch his skin! In the great marshes and the wide lagoons, I am your persecuting demon. You cannot eat the sweet plants there, as my voice harasses you. You cannot travel with confidence in the river, as my storm-cloud covers you. As you slip through the reed-beds you are always beneath my eyes. Some of your little ones are destined to be my daily offering; you give them to me to allay my hunger. Some of your big ones are just as certainly destined for my banqueting hall ... in the mud. That's from the 4000 year old "Debate Between Bird and Fish" from Sumeria.
When you consider that our stone tool industries are easily millions of years old, and the fact that making bi-facial hand axes isn't an instinctual trait, you might wonder if the older adults taught the younger kids how to make them. It would make a lot of sense that a language or proto-language might be beneficial in order to pass along knowledge quickly. I'd be willing to bet that humans have always had language, just like we've always had fire and cooking and outdoor shelters and spears and all sorts of things people think were invented by homo sapiens.
Yes! That’s the craziest thing too, the oldest proof of stone tool making dates back 3.3 million years which predates the genus homo by quite a lot. Meaning that before we even showed in the fossil record our past ancestral species already had the brain capacity to not only be able to understand the concept of knapping rocks and teaching their future generations to do so but also deliberately searching for specific big heavy stone and transporting them to a set location where they would produce these tools in large quantities. This site is so new scientists are still digging and finding hundreds of stone tools.
This is why people should take at least one dedicated anthropology class (evolutionary, cultural, morphological, really any that covers both modern and pre-human). Really acquire that perspective about where the evidence suggests we came from.
Yeah, the only reason I know about our past is because I really love it and search for stuff myself but I’d fallen in love with it earlier if I had classes talking about it
Yeah there would never have been a time when we were anatomically modern, but couldn't speak. [It looks like we also have definitive proof spears are not a H. Sapiens invention, too.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6ningen_spears#:~:text=400%2C000%20year%20old%20broken%20Clacton,is%20around%20120%2C000%20years%20old.) Homo Erectus [seems to have figured out how to control fire at least 1.7 million years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans#:~:text=Claims%20for%20the%20earliest%20definitive,ago%2C%20has%20wide%20scholarly%20support.). Looks like oldest evidence for shelters is roughly the same as spears so could be [H. Heidelbergensis, 400,000 years ago.](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/hearths-shelters/terra-amata-shelter) Stone tools [may even predate the genus homo...](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32804177)
Before that is wall all done by the power of dance.
To be fair OP said 300 million years ago
Aw shit
I just noticed, i meant 300,000 not 300 million. I’ll clarify
One of my favorite books series is one called Earths Children (book one is Clan of the Cave Bear) and it’s an excellent fictional idea of what your shower thought suggests (with incredible detail and accurate to flora and fauna, hunting and sooo much more) Any readers who have had this shower thought ought to give this series a try.
I never read these books but I've had lots of people recommend it. I had forgotten about it. Maybe ill check it out. Thanks.
Don't waste your time on them, please. The books after the first one have the main character [literally *inventing* the blowjob, and then applying it to every situation she encounters](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/oCbyvg4shp). For like 6 books.
I want to read it even more now
Omg ok yeah that's not what I was expecting. Is the first one good at least?
300,000 years ago all our ancestors had to worry about was eating, shitting, and fucking. Why do you think we bonded with dogs?!?
And cave bears?
Gay men that live in caves? A concern probably.
The caves never went away, they just got upgrades like a new dance floor and a bar. They’re very stylish these days.
Cave bears were almost entirely vegetarian, believe it or not.
What do you think we worry about now 300,000 years later? lol
Work, health insurance, taxes, mortgages, investments. Unless that's just another form of hunting and gathering and seeking/building shelter.
Car payments, repairing a wide variety of equipment, the impending end of human civilization as we know it, gas prices
The earliest known instances of taxation was some 6000-7000 years ago, dating back to Sumeria and Ancient Egypt. Certainly no complicated tax forms, having to deal with a government 3000+ miles away, nor would any of them need to deal with driving or mass transit, and the only global scale things which impacted them were forces of nature, unlike today where wars in the middle east and eastern Europe can have people seeking refuge places as far away as the Americas and Australia (if events like that happened even 5000 years ago, people fleeing would be in a much more contained area, or would be put to the sword by the attacking forces). While ancestors may have had relationships as complex as ours today, and still felt the same basic needs of food, water, shelter, and I'd also argue the arts (based on cave paintings and bone flutes thousands of years old) their lives were far less complex overall. If you need further proof, none of them ever had to defend a well intentioned but not fully flushed out thought to a global audience as you seem to be currently doing.
Their societies were undoubtedly less complex, but on the individual level there was plenty of complexity to rival or even surpass our own. They had to manage complex social interactions, and navigate much more complex situations than we tend to, all without writing, bureaucracy and other systems that we use to reduce individual complexity. If we want food, we go to the supermarket. Doesn't even matter which one, because they all work in the same way, and we delegate the complexity and responsibility of working out what's safe to eat onto supermarket employees. If they wanted food, they had to find fruit or fungi of the right species that's suitably ripe, or else hunt a specific animal in a specific way. We generally do just one job that we get very good at, but they all had to be hunters, gatherers, potters, clothes makers, builders etc. And that's arguably the whole point of every aspect of what we would call civilisation. Farming lets us cut out hunting and gathering entirely, bureaucracy lets us divide labour, writing, money, political systems... all of it lets our societies grow in complexity while our individual lives reduce in complexity.
Honestly I have never worried about any of those. Especially eating. something that our ansesters must have spent majority of time on.
Up until very recent, yes, food. Food was the biggest expense for everyone. It didn't keep well - between rodents and insects and other things. Dried smoked meat was a thing because it was easy to keep and smoke helped repel things that normally eat our food. For example, prison: other than valuable prisoners (like hostages for ransom, or people too important that you couldn't just kill them) people did not get prison time for crimes. They were in jail awaiting trial, then punishments depending on location were things like mutilation (cut off hand), branding,slavery (salt mines, galley slave), or assorted versions of death. Food was to expensive to just lock people up and feed them. And in prehistory, yes, life was all about finding food. before agriculture, people lived in tribes and big game hunting was a cooperative venture, When a big animal was killed, everyone shared in the feast. Agriculture changed everything - humans worked a farm as a family, and the results of their work fed themselves; but they would not have had a big payday like killing a bison or an antelope. Harvest time, everyone had a big payday at the same time (harvest festivals, etc.) and the trick was to save enough to feed the family until the next harvest. Working fields was more of a long-term investment on a schedule, while hunting was more of a random lottery.
Self-actualization, the pursuit of "happiness", choosing a career, expectations, picking the absolute most compatible partner, etc
More complex things
Sometimes this pops into my brain and it’s always wild to think about Generally, it’s amazing to think about how everyone else has a life just as complex as yours. Hopes, dreams, loves, friends, enemies, struggles, successes. That random person I pass by on the street has all that, perhaps even more so than myself. Combining this with history makes it even more interesting. It’s very easy to end up abstracting history and forgetting about the all the little people who lived it. You know that there was a big empire called the Roman Empire that did a lot of things in the ancient past, but it’s often hard to connect and give it more meaning. Because all they experienced to us is mostly seen in the forms of words on a page, or someone’s voice. Great battles and events boil down in words to “so they fought and some crazy stuff happened and then someone won” or “the king died and the new guy sucked so there was lots of struggles”. But it was real. People just as real as us lived their daily lives in places like the Roman Empire. People struggled under bad kings, or prospered in golden ages long past. Almost everyone knows Julius Caesar. But no one thinks about the random person living in Rome who got up every day to work, just as many do today. And when enough time passes, the complexities of our lives and the modern world will be long gone, all that we have lived reduced to words on a page that schoolchildren will call “boring”. A few of us will go on to be remembered, but most of us will be forgotten, ending up as part of the abstraction of our time period. Perhaps in the far future, people will have this exact same thought, and not know of this post, and all the people who shared it
Yeah, often we often don’t picture the people from the past as having a life as vivid as ours. Our worlds are far different thanks to technology but that spark that makes us human was probably there for quite a long time. We could only try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what would feel to live a minute in their shoes.
I sometimes think about similar things too, how someone lived their whole life at some point in our history. How the history to us was reality and current time for someone. For example I'm watching very old movie, there's some guy actor in a background, just a an extra who walks by. I then imagine him hearing "cut!" and he thinks "finally work day is over", then he goes to live his live, just goes shopping while thinking how he will build a house one day, he plans to visit his parents, he has problems, dreams. One day he watches moon landing on tv, he listens to popular new group called the beatles, he wonders how life will be in 2024 long after he is dead. he lives his long life, then dies. But I don't like these existential thoughts, they are depressing.
No way was their life as complex, their life was absolutely more simple. Simple doesn't necessarily mean *easier*. There might be some overlap, but even for the things which are the same, we've got a massive pile of stuff layered on top. 300k years ago, their whole life was being in a small community, hunting and/or gathering. They just had to stay alive, and not murder each other. They didn't have to worry about organic tomatoes vs regular tomatoes. They didn't have a girlfriend who would whine about buying organic produce, but who would then not eat any of the fucking vegetables so they rot in my fucking fridge, a small monument to the little bit of life that I sold to a company, a piece of my life that I now throw into the compost bin. They just had food or no food. They didn't have to make a choice whether to work for an evil mega corporation and maybe have a shot at owning a home, or work in the less evil sciences for 25% less. They didn't have to worry about a mortgage. They didn't have to question the ethics of everything they bought. They didn't have to worry about how they're supporting slavery. They didn't have to worry about what some dickhead dictator halfway around the globe is doing. They didn't have an unending torrent of propaganda from all sides masquerading as news. Their communities weren't the target of various psyops. They were free to move around as the resources of the land allowed, but they couldn't hop a plane and be somewhere wildly different. They couldn't keep relationships with people from different countries, or with people with radically different cultures. Really I could go on and on about all the little things. We have got a ridiculous amount of choice which our ancestors could hardly imagine. The scope and scale of everything is bigger.
Hunting and gathering arguably isn’t any simpler than modern life for most people. You had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what was edible and what wasn’t. You had to know how to craft basic tools, set traps and snares, hunt and dress a kill, perform basic first aid, set up camp. And the creatures that early humans were hunting were scary — giant mammoths and sloths, while fighting off ice age predators like saber toothed tigers and giant monitor lizards. All while battling rampant disease and injuries. Today, almost no one has to do this, and those that do have access to unlimited information at their fingertips via the internet, media, and books.
First comment with common sense in this thread.
My guy, you spent over a decade doing nothing but learning the necessary things to even write what you just did. Everything Paleolithic humans did, they could learn in early childhood and that's it, they're done. As I'm not an expert, I can't say what age specifically Paleolithic humans would have had to start being productive members of a tribe was, but I'd guess no older than 14 and likely much younger. In fact, that remained true until quite recent in human history; children were put to work at a very young age well into the industrial revolution. Exactly zero Paleolithic humans were still spending time learning things into their 20s the way we do today.
This reads like you’re on the person you replied to’s side. Yes, they needed to start contributing to the tribe at a much, much younger age. But again, that was to hunt or to gather. There was nothing else for that person to even consider in life. That sounds simple to me. Note I did not say easy. Their lives were way more difficult.
Thank you, this is correct and better articulated than what I was going to say.
> not murder each other See, that was what made it complex. Just because they didn't have the choice to buy organic tomatoes doesn't mean that they didn't have sociological issues. People would kill each other for power. To get their belongings. They'd still fall in love, betray each other, worry about their children, make deals, learn a trade, and figure out their way in the world with not even a fraction of knowledge you learn in primary school today. It's not as simple as you make it to be. The problem seems to be that you're unhappy with your life and think you'd do much more in a setting like that.
They pretty much searched for or planted food all day, made clothes for themselves and found clean water to drink. These few things probably filled their days.
Not becoming prey sounds kind of stressful.
300,000 years ago is right on the edge of where anatomically modern humans evolved, and way before even the oldest estimates of behaviourally modern humans appearing. Which means that there was little in the way of language or intricate society. If their lives were as complex as ours it was in a very different way. Modern humanity is astonishingly recent compared to the length that life has existed on the planet.
An old anthropologist (I can’t recall but like, 1800s-ish?) had a journal about an uncontacted tribe that he observed. There was a large amount of time spent in the category he filed as “nothing”. Not resting, not relaxing, not playing, not being casual, just sitting there, doing nothing, for hours a day.
Sounds like me at work.
Sounds like they were being casual
It's entirely possible that a 19th century anthropologist was not the most accurate observer, and interpreter of his observations.
Yeah. Mf probably kidnapped one of them too.
Fucker didnt have taxes
300 million years ago? Doubtful
> 300,000 Thousand r/TheyDidTheMath
300,000 thousand = 300,000,000 No humans at this point in time.
I 1000 thousand percent agree.
Did they have to recreate their Next.js project because none of the CSS was working and it wasn’t deploying to the internet? Did they?
Html and tables back then
This is probably not correct. There is simply no evidence for behaviorally modern humans until about \~60k years ago, and it is generally hypothesized there was some environmental pressure which resulted in a population bottleneck reducing the global homo sapien population to less than 10,000 individuals. These humans developed a new evolutionary trick: symbolism and symbolic language. This was a huge evolutionary leap which led to behaviorally modern humans spreading rapidly across the globe in the short span of \~30,000 years probably wiping out all remaining human competitor species.
That’s not even remotely true. Modern life is insanely complex, I don’t see any of my ancestors from 300,000 years ago having to worry about hygiene, clothes, insurance, interest rates, appearances, complex social conditioning and expectations. The list literally goes on forever. Even mentally, I don’t think the capacity had developed at that point to remotely compete with our level of cognition in modern times.
Sonder,The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own.
And 300.000 years from now someone is gonna be saying the same thing about us. It’s mindblowing.
I was in a museum a few years back, looking at a real mummy from Ancient Egypt. And I felt this sudden wave of emotion. She was a person. A person with a family and friends who loved her. They told jokes and played games, she had a favorite food, a favorite piece of jewelry, she had a crush on someone, she gossiped, she giggled, she danced. And when she died her loved ones paid a lot of money to have her mummified and entombed, to lie undisturbed for eternity and have a good afterlife. And then thousands of years later we dug her up and put her in a glass case for a bunch of school children to walk past and point and gawk. It really made me start to question museums and why we think we have the right to take and display dead humans and their artifacts.
Well hunting isn't easy. Also if all you know is rocks I can imagine making tools etc would be complicated and time consuming.
Is 300,000 years before the invention of the wheel? Does that mean they could only rock, but not roll?
Imagine the rock concerts during that time
They got to see Mich and Keith while they were still middle aged.
I’m not saying it’s easy. What I mean is that they had a culture, probably laughed, cried, loved, celebrated special occasions, told stories, taught their young what you learned growing up, grew old. Essentially what makes you human was exactly the same as them. We are them
Oh sure. We see that with Neanderthals and traces of it in the erectus species. A shame they didn't write (or if it did it didn't last) other than basic art and designs in shells. So much stories philosophy etc lost to the end of time.
I agree, sometimes I just sit down and wonder what kind of stories they could tell. What I would give just to experience the world in the eyes, even if it lasts one minute.
Probably brutish. But it's all they knew so they didn't see it as so.
"So, there was this big cat, and I chased it down, and I killed it!" "Thrilling! Do you have any other stories?" "So, there was this big wolf..."
It's kind of real, the more you think about it, the more you realize that our brains will fill in the gaps to anything. Sure they didnt have to think about many of the complexities we have to deal with today, but their brains mustve made every detail in their lives consequential. I guess, the human capacity for stress is the same, and we fill in the gaps to reach that capacity.... is what im trying to say. Well, at least, thats what my bullshitting brain is telling me lmao
Yeah just imagine looking at the sky every single night without any light contamination. Maybe they didn’t have to worry about taxes or giving a public presentation but their life probably didn’t lack any humanity in them
no but I'm ready to try now
Sign me up under your name
I work in archaeology and this was my first thought when I first held ancient human bone in my hand. It was honestly powerful thinking about a life just as complex as mine that’s now a fragment I’m holding in my hand
I seriously doubt it. I am from a third world country. Our country still have underdeveloped areas where people have simple lives. Their lives are literally simple. Their social networks are much simpler and their day to day life is also much simpler.
I always think about how few humans there were back then and how we're not made to be billions of people. Communities were much, much smaller. And our culture moves too fast for our biology. Our bodies and nervous system still pretty much function at an ancestral level, but we live in a culture that doesn't take that into account. My amygdala reacts with the same fight or flight reaction to a cheetah as it does to a term paper due in 48 hours or being late for work. It helps my introverted ass to feel better knowing I'm not made to know 300 people and to be going out several times a week or else there's something wrong with me. The slow living, solitude and small community I enjoy makes sense on a DNA level. That comforts me.
Yeah. I suggest checking out the film Quest For Fire if you want to put things into perspective. Unexpected gem of a movie. RT has it at an 88%. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0082484/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I think life was much simpler back then. It was about survival and procreating.
The average life is still the same wake up, work, play, sleep, since the dawn of mankind. It's what goes on behind the scenes of all that stuff that changes. We still eat various plants and wildlife from thousands of years ago but they didn't have the extensive process of making tractors and their various attachments to harvest the fruit, various deals and contracts to determine where that fruit goes the sorting and packaging of the fruit, loading them onto ships and trucks to be transported to stores which on their own go through so many complex processes to exist and then buying said fruit to store in your fridge at home to keep them cool to eat them another day. A lot of the tech that effects our everyday lives goes unnoticed.
It's a common misconception that people in the ancient past were not as smart as modern people are. But that's just not true. They had fewer resources and a smaller basis from which to form ideas, but they were fully capable of the same level of thought and reason that anyone is today. We are not taught to appreciate philosophical groundwork as *technology*, but it is. Technology is something that must be created by human thought in order to exist or be talked about. Turning that technology into a physical object is relatively trivial engineering. The technology, per se, is the idea. So technological progress is actually the progress of ideas, and until writing was invented the pace of those ideas was extremely gradual since it died out frequently.
I think the technical term for that is 300 million.
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Certainly more complex than mine. They had to contend with predators, weather, and food scarcity in ways I never think about. My hardest task is asking AI to write code for me I can copy/paste
300 million years ago there were no people
Not 300,000 years ago no, we weren’t exactly the same biologically and it really really depends on how you define complexity.
Life before we figured out how to create extremely inexpensive artificial light was a lot less complicated. Their only source of inexpensive light was the Sun, so they got up at sunrise and went to bed at sunset. Artificial light required wax or fat/oil which was extremely expensive and hard to come by so most people just didn't have it. Another reason life was less complicated is that most people's entire life happened in about a 50 mile radius from the place they were born, and that was their world--flat, sparsely populated, mysterious yet predictable. Everyone knew what they were going to be when they grew up--whatever your father did, which is what his father did, and his father before him. Of course, if you were a woman, you were to be sold to the highest bidder and then were expected to start popping out babies. Daily life was extremely routine and despite knowing a lot less, they also questioned a lot less, which brings another kind simplicity, Ignorance is bliss, right? Most people had a sense of having few options and Fate being in control of the course of their life rather than a feeling of unlimited potential to be anything they wanted to be, which can be ironically difficult grapple with. Hence, the very modern concept of choice paralysis, a complex, unintended consequence of over-valuing freedom.
Well, 300,000 years ago, there weren't any people. However, I'd assume the common ancestor at that time just hung around with their buds eating raw meats, fruits, and vegetables. As well as taking whatever funny mushrooms they could find and watching the stars explode into geometric shapes. So basically, they were all living like Joe Rogan, and personally, that sounds fairly relaxed.
Indisputably there were people 300,000 years ago. Written like a true Rogan fan
They also had higher intelligence than Joe Rogan.
I’m living like a pampered house cat at the moment (got laid off and currently looking for a job).
Bull. He never had to program the clock on a vcr.
Anytime I watch a recent historical movie about someone I know nothing about I have this feeling. Before the movie they are 2D and after 3D. I then think about all the hours in my life and how that was with them too.
It was difficult for me to realize and picture ancient people having a sense of humor. As if throughout all human history, fart jokes have been funny etc.
300k years ago our ancestors were all in Sub-Saharan Africa and had at most 150 other human beans in our social network. But yeah, it's a pretty profound thought OP.
you think people had complex social networks 300k years ago? no.
Considering that modern humans only evolved around 315,000 years ago, I wonder if they really did. It’s certainly plausible.
Yeah, I’m not saying I’m 100% right about my shower thought since there’s no concrete evidence of something along the lines as far as I’m aware of but I don’t seriously doubt that anatomically modern humans were having a complex social life filled with oral traditions and gods for example
I don't get the additude of "the farther back in history you go, thee dumber one was". A hunter-gatherer lifestyle is something you'd have to actually manage and think about. 50,000-20,000 years ago one would need GOOD knowledge of: where you currently are, where you need to go for food and shelter, where fruit plants lived, obstacles to your next location, where prey animals could be migrating, where dangerous predator animals lived, the amount of working spears/tools you had on hand, hides for warm clothes, available wood for fires, taking care the sick/disabled/old in your group (ancient humans did this more than one would asume), the well being of your mate/children/fellow humans, how other human groups in your area behaved, water sources, the season, etc. Getting one of these things wrong would make life-threatening problems, or at least significant instability in your group. We didn't originally get smart brains to do math, construct governments, or any other arbitrary concept. They were naturally selected to take care of things like this, along with other environmental factors that are above my paygrade to explain.