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posted by martyb on Friday March 16 2018, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the Moog-want-spear...-Gork-want-axe? dept.

Signs of symbolic behavior emerged at the dawn of our species in Africa

More than 320,000 years ago in the Rift Valley of Africa, some early innovators adopted a new technology: They eschewed the clunky, palm-size stone hand axes that their ancestors had used for more than a million years in favor of a sleek new toolkit. Like new generations of cellphones today, their Middle Stone Age (MSA) blades and points were smaller and more precise than the old so-called Acheulean hand axes and scrapers.

These toolmakers in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya chose as raw materials shiny black obsidian and white and green chert, rocks they had to get from distant sources or through trade networks. In another first, they chiseled red and black rocks, probably to use as crayons to color their bodies or spears—an early sign of symbolic behavior. "This is indicative of a gear change in behavior, toolmaking, and material culture," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies social networks.

A trio of papers released online in Science today documents this remarkable technological transition. Although other sites have yielded MSA tools, the new, securely dated chronology nudges the transition back by at least 20,000 years, matching when our species, Homo sapiens, is now thought to have emerged. By analyzing artifacts over time at one site, the papers also show that these behaviors developed as climate swings intensified, supporting the idea that environmental variability drove innovation.

Related:

Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200) (DX)

Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2216) (DX)

Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2646) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:03PM (36 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:03PM (#653619)

    For so many years, people have spoken of the possibility of mankind having a much richer history than taught by the mainstream educators; those people have been utterly lambasted, and dragged through the mud in the most public and humiliating ways.

    And, yet, over the last 20 years, there has been an exponentially growing body of facts indicating that they were correct.

    Listen, people. Still today, we in our modern, technologically advanced "Civilization" live among hunter-gatherer tribes, some of whom don't even know we exist. Were a global cataclysm to strike, it would be those meek hunter-gatherers who survive, and it would be their descendants who inherit the earth, wondering how their own advanced civilization came to be, passing down stories that would one day be confused as ancient myth.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @04:24PM (35 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @04:24PM (#653656) Journal

    And, yet, over the last 20 years, there has been an exponentially growing body of facts indicating that they were correct.

    And yet that evidence doesn't exist. Here, we're speaking of an adjustment of just over 6% in the timing of an ancient technology advance. That would be like adjusting an event 10,000 years ago by 600 years. More precise, but it doesn't challenge the present day understanding.

    • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:01PM (10 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:01PM (#653675)

      Not only is there a indisputable site like the Göbekli Tepe, which has totally and indisputably thrown a wrench into the modern narrative, but there are also other kinds of populations such as the Denisovans, who seem to have had a much more advanced culture than was ever expected. There are also unexplained symbolic parallels between geographically disparate peoples.

      More importantly, though, is the fact that many examples of megalithic across the planet have probably been attributed incorrectly to populations that found them long after they were constructed; those later populations simply built atop them.

      I invite people to look into the matter themselves; look past the "Ancient Alien" stuff, and just marvel at the oddities and incongruity.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @05:29PM (9 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @05:29PM (#653695) Journal

        Not only is there a indisputable site like the Göbekli Tepe, which has totally and indisputably thrown a wrench into the modern narrative, but there are also other kinds of populations such as the Denisovans, who seem to have had a much more advanced culture than was ever expected.

        No, you are wrong here. Göbekli Tepe merely indicates that stone working knowledge was more advanced in a single region than expected. While there might have been an implicit assumption in the recent past to assume that everyone developed in the same way, it's not instrumental to our current models that things evolve that way. To give an example of this reasoning, are we less advanced than the Incas because we haven't bothered to learn how they made tight stone work like Machu Picchu? Or is it rather, that we could master that just fine, we just haven't bothered to, because our current technology is much more suited to our societies?

        There are also unexplained symbolic parallels between geographically disparate peoples.

        No, there isn't. For example, a common claim is that geographically disparate peoples have flood mythologies. However, floods are also geographically disparate (and universal - even in deserts and on islands in the ocean!) and it is routine for storytellers to exaggerate their narration of disasters their cultures experience to the point of being worldwide, particularly when explaining how the world was made in the first place. Thus, we have plenty of stories of global flood, fire, nightfall, earthquakes, etc.

        Similarly, stones are geographically disparate, so it is no surprise that use of those stones is also geographically disparate. It doesn't demonstrate common origin.

        Key damning evidence against these claims is that we don't have a global technology distribution that couldn't be explained by people taking and improving what they had with them in the traditional models of human progress. We don't have global DNA spread. Any global culture that exchanges ideas and trades will also exchange DNA. We don't have global language evolution that can't be explained by the usual. And we don't actually have the "unexplained" symbolic parallels.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:48PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:48PM (#653707)

          As has already been pointed out to you before, "indigenous" people of the Amazon have been linked by DNA [smithsonianmag.com] to the indigenous people of Australia.

          Also, elongated skulls of Peru have been associated by DNA to Europe.

          And, the ancient Egyptians have been associated by DNA with the people of the Levant and to some degree of Europe.

          Of course, there is also still Neanderthal DNA in a lot Eurasians, and there is still Denisovan DNA in a lot of Asians.

          Also, one must consider the effects of genetic drift.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:24PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @08:24PM (#653778) Journal
            Sorry, those results don't show what you think they show. In the linked article, for example, they explain the similarities between the native Australian population and the South American population by common ancestry from when the earliest humans migrated over to the New World. And the rarity of the above genetic correlations, when they actually exist, would still mean there isn't a lot of genetic transfer from the alleged global culture. That in turn indicates that there wasn't such a global culture.
        • (Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @06:37PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @06:37PM (#653732) Journal

          Actually, we *do* have global DNA spread, and it's quite old. This, however, is more a tribute to the spreading capabilities of DNA within a species than anything else. Very little DNA is specific to a particular area, though the proportion of the population presenting it is highly variable.

          That said, neutral drift and population reduction in catastrophes can cause extreme variability in proportions even without environmental advantage. And if the population is reduced sufficiently it can easily remove the less common alleles.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @07:04PM (5 children)

          by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @07:04PM (#653747) Journal
          "Göbekli Tepe merely indicates that stone working knowledge was more advanced in a single region than expected."

          That's not at all how I read it.

          Humans had already been working with stone for hundreds of thousands of years and made a wide variety of very effective everyday tools with it. Nothing to do with their level of stoneworking is at all surprising.

          What could have been surprising is the social structure implied. Tribes are typically limited to ~180 people. Federations of tribes may cover large areas and coöperate in some general ways but you don't normally see multiple tribes gathering to party on a regular basis, unless they're too small and in the process of merging.

          Partying in some form or another is a crucial part of tribal life. Typically in areas with strong seasons there is at least one seasonal gathering when the entire tribe comes together in a special place and parties. This is very important to maintain cohesion and to keep bands healthy. During the festival bands may lose or gain members or even dissolve or form new. These parties develop traditions quickly and what we might see as 'religious' aspects easily, and they define the tribe.

          And Göbekli Tepe sure looks like a special place for seasonal parties. Not a surprise that. What's surprising is it's huge. Larger than seems reasonable for a single tribe. And the investment of time and energy into all that stone - not that they *could* do it but that they *did* go to the trouble.

          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @08:31PM (#653781) Journal
            The climate of the region seemed to have encouraged it. Occupation was seasonal. Perhaps they migrated out during good foraging months and then stayed over in this area during the tougher part of the year. At that point, you would have had a high density of tribes in the area and a need to organize.
            • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @09:00PM

              by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @09:00PM (#653798) Journal
              I'm trying to remember exactly who it was, I think it's from one of those history channel docus or something so maybe just nonsense, but I am remembering hearing that there was some evidence for a year-round custodial staff at the site. If that were true, it might have been the very first professional priesthood, and the first sedentary humans. It's possible that a clan settled down at the site, built it up over time, and that it functioned to unite a federation as if they were a single tribe. The Jebusites are said to have come from the same area originally, at least approximately.
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:54AM (2 children)

            by Reziac (2489) on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:54AM (#653959) Homepage

            Did you see what they found when they did ground radar? There's a whole buried village adjacent, built in stone. Show me any migratory culture that does this. Everything about the structure, the art, the amount of work required to achieve it, the labor cost to bring in food for the builders, speaks of a settled civilization with agriculture sufficient to feed a permanent population. (And those decorated monoliths appear to be roof supports.)

            I think we just haven't dug deep enough to uncover our earliest civilizations. No big mystery there, just a lot of time and debris and the fact that sites get built over again and again.

            --
            And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
            • (Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:05AM (1 child)

              by Arik (4543) on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:05AM (#653961) Journal
              Got a link?
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
              • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:21AM

                by Reziac (2489) on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:21AM (#653962) Homepage

                Thought I'd saved it, but bloody hell if I can find it offhand. If I come across it again I'll (try to remember to) post it. They had some pretty good radar images showing probably a hundred such buildings.

                --
                And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @05:05PM (23 children)

      by JNCF (4317) on Friday March 16 2018, @05:05PM (#653679) Journal

      Göbleki Tepe did push the date for monolithic structures back considerably, but yeah, there's no good evidence for more advanced civilizations than that existing longer than previously thought.

      Here's a question I grapple with: what is the most advanced technology that could have existed before the end of the last ice age without us having good evidence for it today? On the far-out end, if we left modern vehicles in an area below the new water line would there be any evidence of them 11,000 years later? Answering this question negatively would not mean that such a civilization existed, but answering it positively would practically rule it out. If we left monolithic structures on pre-Younger Dryas coastlines, would they last? I find it more reasonable that a civilization of this tech level could go missing without leaving some sort of inland remnants for us to discover by 2018. Of course, there is a whole continuum of potentials between these extremes (and even outside of them).

      Given the general die-off during the Younger Dryas, it would be amazing if we didn't lose some amount of culture and technology. The question is how much. Are we talking about arrowhead designs, or basic metalwork? Arrowheads seem obvious, even without direct evidence. We know that hunter-gathers lose technology when they hit population bottlenecks. Metalwork would be entirely speculative, but I don't think it's outside the realm of reasonable possibility.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @05:35PM (4 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @05:35PM (#653700) Journal

        Here's a question I grapple with: what is the most advanced technology that could have existed before the end of the last ice age without us having good evidence for it today?

        It would have to be small and in isolation. At that point, it then becomes a simple matter of some natural disaster covering up the evidence, combined with researchers not looking in the right spots.

        On the far-out end, if we left modern vehicles in an area below the new water line would there be any evidence of them 11,000 years later?

        Some vehicles have platinum and gold in them. Those would still be around. Same goes for gold jewelry. That stuff is pretty durable and would last thousands of years easily - the main way it goes away is by someone finding and reusing it.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:42PM (#653704)

          Many massive, important, influential ancient civilizations existed without gold-and-platinum-containing vehicles.

          As far as jewelry is concerned, though, what about the intricately curved Denisovan bracelet [wikipedia.org], wrought from the very difficult material jade? That has been dated, pretty much indisputably, to 40,000 years before present.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:33PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @08:33PM (#653783) Journal

            Many massive, important, influential ancient civilizations existed without gold-and-platinum-containing vehicles.

            I answered a legitimate question about how a common artifact of our era would have survived 11,000 years. I imagine that more of the car would survive than just that (such as plastics, glass, and rubber tires), particularly, if buried.

            As far as jewelry is concerned, though, what about the intricately curved Denisovan bracelet [wikipedia.org], wrought from the very difficult material jade? That has been dated, pretty much indisputably, to 40,000 years before present.

            How much of the world does that bracelet appear in? Jewelry in one place is not a demonstration of global presence.

        • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @06:08PM (1 child)

          by JNCF (4317) on Friday March 16 2018, @06:08PM (#653719) Journal

          It would have to be small and in isolation.

          If it spread along the coasts, not necessarily. I do think that this requirement all but rules out civs past a certain tech and population threshold -- if they covered all the coastal land they would eventually move inwards.

          Some vehicles have platinum and gold in them. Those would still be around. Same goes for gold jewelry. That stuff is pretty durable and would last thousands of years easily - the main way it goes away is by someone finding and reusing it.

          We're talking about a small gold trinket left unprotected on a shoreline for over ten thousand years. You think it would necessarily still be recoverable in the modern day? I can imagine the hypothetical artifact getting swept into the ocean and banged against rocks until it became unrecognisable.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:38PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @08:38PM (#653787) Journal

            If it spread along the coasts, not necessarily.

            I disagree. You would have widespread common artifacts, genetic heritage, language, etc which we would see today. Let us keep in mind that the traditional model already takes into account a lot of prehistoric migration, so it's not like the establishment completely discounts the idea.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:37PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:37PM (#653701)

        We don't know how certain works were achieved even in ancient society that is recognized. They don't teach that in schools.

        More than a continent's worth of coastal land (you know, where most people tend to live) has been swallowed up in rising sea levels in the last few 10s of the thousands of years, and humans of modern form (physically, and as far as we can tell, mentally) go back as much as 200 thousand years. That's a lot of time, and a lot of archaeologically unexplored territory.

        There are megalithic structures in Peru which are attributed to Indians of the last millennium, but even they attribute those structures to the "gods" who came before them, and Lake Titicaca would have last been striking their vicinity some 12 thousand years ago, as also evidenced by astronomical alignments of the stones, which only work at that time, too.

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @06:51PM (3 children)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @06:51PM (#653738) Journal

          While the statement "We don't know how certain works were achieved even in ancient society that is recognized." is true, it's misleading. Usually we can think of several ways it it could have been achieved and can't validly choose between them. Usually when people say "There's no way they could do that" they're either revealing their ignorance of technical approaches, or they're unwilling to accept that massive an amount of labor.

          E.g.: Did you know that Roman legions stationed in Carthage ate ice sherbets? The approach was simple, you dig a deep pit and line it with straw. You make a wooden cover for it, and cover that with straw. Every night you leave the lid off to the desert sky. Every day before dawn you put the lid on again. I believe it only took a few days to freeze the pot of mix. Nothing magic, no high tech, just a simple technical approach, and the legions could have a treat that in Rome only the Emperor could afford.

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM (2 children)

            by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM (#653752) Journal
            "Usually when people say "There's no way they could do that" they're either revealing their ignorance of technical approaches, or they're unwilling to accept that massive an amount of labor."

            This is without a doubt the 'secret' behind many ancient wonders. The willingness to invest incredible amounts of labor over long periods of time.

            Many of these things were built over multiple generations. In a world where most projects last a few month, and are obsolete before they release, many people simply cannot conceive of it, but it's true. The man who finished a project might be the grandson of the man who started it. Three generations, working diligently, if not on a daily basis at least a seasonal one, year after year, decade after decade, that was the true genius of the ancients that we have lost.

            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:45PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @08:45PM (#653791) Journal

              Three generations, working diligently, if not on a daily basis at least a seasonal one, year after year, decade after decade, that was the true genius of the ancients that we have lost.

              We don't need that for most things. It doesn't take three generations to build even our largest buildings. For example, NASA built the Vehicle Assembly Building in about four years and that is one of the largest buildings in the world by internal volume.

              Another problem is that a three generation project has the potential to become obsolete before it is finished. For example, a large project on the coastline might be flooded by climate change (if the warnings come true). A computation project would be forever updating on more advanced hardware. It'd be quite the challenging, moving target to plan something so many years in advance.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:36AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:36AM (#653938)

              Science, mathematics and technology are like that. The knowledge that started to be formalized thousands of years ago has reached incredible heights.

      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @05:57PM (9 children)

        by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @05:57PM (#653711) Journal
        "Here's a question I grapple with: what is the most advanced technology that could have existed before the end of the last ice age without us having good evidence for it today? On the far-out end, if we left modern vehicles in an area below the new water line would there be any evidence of them 11,000 years later? "

        Evidence in some form that some more advanced race might be able to find? Sure. Evidence we'd be likely to notice today with our technology? I'm thinking no. But it does depend on exactly what sort of 'modern vehicles' we're talking about. And also just how it's deposited. It's probably *possible* for something to be sealed in under the ocean without coming into contact with seawater for 11k years but it seems highly improbable.

        So assuming we're going to have some contact with seawater - most modern vehicles until recently were primarily composed of steel. Steel reliably dissolves in salt water. End of story on the bulk of the mass. Rubber and plastic can last longer, and of course we see *more* modern vehicles using more plastic, but the engine, drive train, wheels, etc. on automobiles are all still steel and that would simply have dissolved into the ocean long ago. I rather think plastic has replaced steel on ships significantly less than with cars but I'm not necessarily up to date on that. Most of the big ships I've seen were steel. A lot of smaller craft are wood, and that's probably more likely to be preserved than steel. It still requires special burial events. Several really ancient seawrecks have been discovered. This is an interesting one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokos_shipwreck

        Pottery survives better than steel or wood. I expect plastics and other modern materials, fiberglasses etc. would probably fare better as well. But finding ANYTHING 11k years old usually depends on more than a little good luck.

        "Answering this question negatively would not mean that such a civilization existed, but answering it positively would practically rule it out."

        Unfortunately the best answer is a big fat maybe :(

        "If we left monolithic structures on pre-Younger Dryas coastlines, would they last?"

        A monolith can be a type of megalithic structure, or a geological formation. Which is actually directly relevant here.

        Stone, *depending on which stone* can stand a very good chance of lasting, yes. But would we notice it, would we know it was worth looking at and not mistake it for just another rock?

        Well, probably not. A geologist might take an interest in it, and might notice that it was not of natural origin. Maybe.

        "Given the general die-off during the Younger Dryas, it would be amazing if we didn't lose some amount of culture and technology. The question is how much. Are we talking about arrowhead designs, or basic metalwork? Arrowheads seem obvious, even without direct evidence. We know that hunter-gathers lose technology when they hit population bottlenecks."

        [citation needed]

        "Metalwork would be entirely speculative, but I don't think it's outside the realm of reasonable possibility."

        With no evidence whatsoever? That's in the parlor-game 'anything is possible' realm of speculation.

        Now as long as we acknowledge that, then sure, yes. Not at all impossible that there was very basic metalworking knowledge that far back. Iron is rare but not entirely unavailable without smelting or refining - from meteorites. Meteoric iron can be worked with stone tools. So cold-worked iron is possible - but the earliest evidence for it is bronze age. Gold is quite rare but does occur in fairly pure form in small quantities here and there, and can also be easily worked with stone tools. Copper and silver would be easily workable as well, but I'm not sure if there are any naturally occurring deposits pure enough to use. The vast bulk of metalworking relies on having at least some capacity to refine metals, and I think that's more often than not what we're really talking about when we say metalwork.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @06:23PM (5 children)

          by JNCF (4317) on Friday March 16 2018, @06:23PM (#653724) Journal

          A monolith can be a type of megalithic structure

          Yeah, that's a hurpadurpa moment on my part. I meant megalithic, not monolithic.

          [citation needed]

          On what exactly? The mass die off? The fact that hunter-gatherers lose tech at population bottlenecks? I won't be back on tonight but I can cite either, if asked. The arrowheads and metalwork were noted as speculation.

          With no evidence whatsoever? That's in the parlor-game 'anything is possible' realm of speculation.

          But all possible things are not equally likely. We would be less shocked to find 12,000 year-old metal tools than 12,000 year-old airplanes. I find the question of how shocked we should be quite interesting.

          • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @06:49PM (4 children)

            by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @06:49PM (#653737) Journal
            "On what exactly?"

            The loss of technology thing.

            Why would a population bottleneck necessarily result in loss of technology? Of course it's *possible* something is lost but typically the entire population would be expected to have nearly the entire existing skillset; it's not like there was this one hunter that made all the arrowheads and everyone bought from him. Every hunter knew how to make scrapers and points and how to repair them in the field. Specialization would have been a disadvantage, and impractical. So there's no necessary loss of technology in population bottlenecks that far back. The most recent population bottleneck may have had the opposite effect - there was an article to that effect I read recently but I can't seem to find it again easily.
            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM (#653832)

              Actually, that's pretty much exactly how it worked (specialization). Pretty much everyone learned the basics, but mastery was generally left to the most skilled. When a bad arrow can make the difference between food or starvation, you let the best fletcher fletch and let the best hunters hunt. Everything took a lot of time and effort and considerable skill and knowledge, though it doesn't seem like much from a modern perspective.

            • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday March 19 2018, @04:47PM (2 children)

              by JNCF (4317) on Monday March 19 2018, @04:47PM (#654990) Journal

              One well documented example is Tasmania. I think I read this whole paper (direct PDF) [harvard.edu] a few years ago, but it might have been a similar one. Here's the abstract (emphasis added):

              A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of culturally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution, and reveal regimes that will produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically, the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interacting pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing ten millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the variability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution.

              Consider that without writing, a culture's technology is limited by human memory. Insisting on replication of all data in all humans limits the growth of technology considerably. The less replication we insist on, the more technology we can have. We just also risk losing it if the population declines. One human can not remember all useful skills to the same degree of precision that a hundred humans can.

              • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 19 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)

                by Arik (4543) on Monday March 19 2018, @07:16PM (#655070) Journal
                That's a good example to show that it *can* happen but it's a bit sparse to prove it *must* happen which I think was the assertion I was challenging.

                "Consider that without writing, a culture's technology is limited by human memory."

                Which is why we developed poetry and all the other memory-enhancing technologies that moderns too often forget about.

                --
                If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
                • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 06 2018, @12:21AM

                  by JNCF (4317) on Friday April 06 2018, @12:21AM (#663202) Journal

                  How many examples does it take to show that something *must* happen? It's not a possible task, obviously. No number of measurements can prove that an apple must drop downwards. What would you need to probabilistically convince you that this is a real effect?

                  On poetry and other mnemonics, you're totally correct that they increase the amount of information an individual can store, but that doesn't change the fact that a group of people using those techniques to store overlapping-yet-different sets of information can record more than a group of people using the same techniques to store the exact same set of information in every individual. Increasing bytes-per-capita doesn't change this dynamic.

        • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday March 16 2018, @10:13PM (2 children)

          by t-3 (4907) on Friday March 16 2018, @10:13PM (#653829)

          For copper, there used to be quite a bit of it in the upper peninsula of Michigan, in the area known as "Copper Country" (the Keewenaw Peninsula). The natives used it extensively, but IIRC they didn't forge anything. I also recall being taught about Tenochtitlan being near a mountain of silver that was used by the Aztecs and plundered by the Spanish.

          • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)

            by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM (#653831) Journal
            "For copper, there used to be quite a bit of it in the upper peninsula of Michigan, in the area known as "Copper Country" (the Keewenaw Peninsula)."

            That sounds right. The mississipians used cold-worked copper in burial goods, and they were still technically 'stone age' in toolkit though of course that's very much later nonetheless. I think there was some silver too, impure, copper-silver alloys maybe? But the lack of ability to purify and refine the ores limited the scope severely.

            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:38PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:38PM (#653833)

              From what I recall of "Michigan History" in school, the Keewenaw was notable for exceptional purity, basically as pure as copper gets out of the ground.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM (#653750) Journal

        For "advanced technologies" the problem isn't the existence of artifacts, but the traces of mining for the materials with which to make the artifacts.

        They could have had coal fires, but there's little advantage (and many disadvantages) for a stationary site when there's sufficient wood available. Basically they'd need to develop coke before there'd be advantages for a stationary source unless you imagine cast iron stoves and good chimneys. Minor iron working would be harder to detect than bronze, but that's if it depended on meteoric iron. Iron ore is more problematic, as refining it requires large clay ovens that become extremely well fired, and they durable. Those may be a bit difficult to date, however, and we know that they existed in West Africa around the time of the old Egyptian dynasty. They could be a lot older, but the iron mines give limits on the total amount of iron extracted...and that makes a really ancient origin unlikely.

        Basically, ceramics are hard to date, but they're so durable (if only as shards) that there's a good idea as to whether they were present at any particular site or not.

        OTOH, wood, fabric, and rope don't leave much in the way of evidence. Fire hardened wood is more durable because of the outer layer of pure carbon. Baskets, however, wouldn't be expected to leave any trace. Neither would cloth. Certainly not in any area where termites were common. And wood was an extremely common construction material in almost all past civilizations. Stone working leaves permanent evidence, but is often extremely difficult to date, and isn't very portable.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:58AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:58AM (#653960) Homepage

        Consider: most of today's cities are built on top of older cities, in turn atop villages, atop someone's camp, because the same spot remains attractive to humans across time. How many layers are permanently buried beneath modern city centers?

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:19PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:19PM (#654089)

        Here's a question I grapple with: what is the most advanced technology that could have existed before the end of the last ice age without us having good evidence for it today?

        Amateurs or professionals? Its pretty easy to fool the amateurs especially the ones with only one anecdote as data.

        Two things rarely considered:

        1) Statistics. One gold earring found in the wilderness is a meaningless anomaly. 5000 lost gold earrings, even if smashed and battered into unrecognizable nuggets, can be chemically analyzed and the statistical results will be utterly unnatural. The geologists will pitch an absolute fit at the geologically unexplainable distribution of nuggets by location and size and impurity. A motivated archeologist could run the chemical compositions thru a statistical grouping algorithm and with minimal help from a chemist or engineer could completely reverse engineer our entire karat based gold alloy system down to the decimal points of our specific alloys and could determine the relative value of gold vs copper vs silver and other alloys. Then comes deeper analysis of the chemistry such that the copper that was alloyed with gold could only have been cleaned up by electrorefining (or some more advanced space alien thing, certainly not mere smelting anyway). That implies all kinds of things about the electrical technology when the gold alloy was made for those former earrings, or at least when the copper was refined that eventually alloyed with the gold to make the earrings. Then consider spatial analysis, even after power lines completely corrode away into the soil, a suitably motivated geologist or agronomist or archeologist could manufacture some interesting theories about our long distance electrical power distribution infrastructure based solely on weird distribution of the corrosion products of the alloys ideal for power transformer laminations (if not PCB concentrations in the soil LOL) or long linear deposits of copper from copper power lines. Imagine long after every piece of silicon based electronics is back to sand crystals, someone doing an analysis and reverse engineering our type-N and type-P semiconductor ionic doping process to reverse engineer the stage of electronics technology and world trade we currently have, all from precise and weird contaminants in some sand grains. Actually you could merely look at soil contaminants over large areas and a graph would display something like our transportation networks that could be hand waved away as mere river-beds until the geologists notice good old Highway 66 flows uphill unlike a river flow, not to mention those surveyors making arrow straight roads and railroads. Why, world wide, do weird concentrations of industrial era isotopes show up in sedimentary sea rocks starting at a certain time in concentrations that could only come from the high concentration ore bodies that all are missing according to the geologists?

        2) Lack of something is proof something removed it. It would seem natural for all intelligent beings to remove the easy resources first, this is universal among humans anyway. A survey of industrially useful materials would show all the easy resources that the geologists insist should have formed there, are gone, and plenty of hard to extract resources remain untouched where the geologists predicted they would appear. Huh, every geologist prediction of 7% iron ore is missing, every 2% iron ore body is present, WTF? Essentially no oil drained out of puddles more than 15000 feet below the surface, essentially all shallow large continental deposits are already gone today already. Where's all the anthracite that geologists insist MUST be under new england and old england? How come all the anthracite is gone but lots of bituminous remains, especially far away from where the anthracite is missing? Millions of years after the last uranium mine collapses and cannot be identified, we have continents where all the "good stuff" that should be there, is none the less gone. And given that everthing runs into the seas eventually, you're really going to piss off the geologists trying to explain why our seas have a ridiculously high U235 and Pu concentration compared to other isotopes like you'd expect from uranium ore isotopes...

        The short summary is mother nature washes random junk away into the sea, but humans dig up the best ores first and this will really freak out prospecting geologists when they see the data.