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The discovery of flatbread remains from around 14,500 years ago in northeastern Jordan indicate that people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they were thought to have developed agriculture. The charred bread residue was found in a stone fireplace at an archeological site there.
Reuters : World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan
Haaretz : Archaeologists Find 14,400-year-old Pita in Jordan's Black Desert
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World's Oldest Bread Found at Prehistoric Site in Jordan
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I'm gliding over a NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP near ATLANTA, Georgia!!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:48PM (12 children)
Maybe smarter, on average. They didn't have political parties! Bread parties, beer parties, maybe cannabis parties, but no political parties!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:54PM (11 children)
They were probably a bit dumber than we are, if the Flynn Effect [wikipedia.org] is accurate. According to that, an average modern person is apparently much better than the average 19th century person at handling abstractions (e.g. "oaks are like grasses because they're both plants") and hypotheticals (e.g. "what if I planted an oak tree here?"). One of the reasons proposed for this is that modern people get much better nutrition than a 19th century person would, and by extension they'd get better nutrition than the average Stone Age person because a steady diet is a useful thing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:02PM
We could wish that more Americans dieted steadily.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:44PM (5 children)
While a steady diet is a good thing, and I'm pretty sure I've noticed Asians getting tall, faster than genetics should allow, as they embrace our rich food over traditional one, there is one minor issue with your statement. The South of Europe is littered with 2000 yr-old remnants of people who could look at a valley and abstract a gently-sloping 80-mile aqueduct going through a couple hills.
The average person did not need to do that, but nothing tells us that they couldn't have, had they gone to school instead of helping on the farm.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:40PM (4 children)
I didn't say they couldn't do it, I said that on average modern people are better at it. Building Roman aqueducts takes 1 person with the idea, plus a relatively small number of people trained in the art of building arches and solving other engineering challenges, plus a lot of slaves with not a ton of training to do the heavy lifting.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)
> Building Roman aqueducts takes 1 person with the idea, plus a relatively small number of people trained in the art of building arches
> and solving other engineering challenges, plus a lot of slaves with not a ton of training to do the heavy lifting.
That is ... quite an understatement.
Even if I gave you access to Google topo maps, laser sights, and modern power tools, could you build me a stone-and-concrete conduit that goes tens of feet down over a run of tens of miles, through extremely varied footing through hills and valleys? Finding the path that works, then planning and executing with the resources you have requires a lot more abstract thinking than you seem to imply. You're totally Dunning-Krugering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:19PM
What I'm saying is you need 1 person with the skills of a grand architect to lead the project, a few hundred people with significant engineering chops, and a lot of grunts. Since the Flynn Effect deals with averages, the Romans had enough smart people to make that work. Sure, the Roman engineers did a great job of it, since a lot of their stuff is still there, but it's not like the ancient Romans were a society of geniuses or anything of the sort. Mostly, they were into the same sorts of things we're into: sex, violence, drugs, and their version of rock 'n' roll, in approximately that order.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:22PM (1 child)
No need to be nasty. That's basically implying the GP is an idiot, which is certainly not the case (based on other posts I've read from that username). Yes, building an aqueduct to Roman specifications is hard work and requires all sorts of engineering challenges, but Romans did find ways to standardize the process. And some of their engineering was a much more rudimentary way of doing things that we'd do today -- because they did not have the technical understanding, let alone the technology, to do it our way -- which led to some odd and inefficient design choices that paradoxically make the structures look more impressive to us today. But GP is right that if you have expendable slaves whose lives don't matter, you can do very inefficient things (because you can just conquer yet another neighboring tribe and enslave them).
So, basically GP is more-or-less correct. Yes, you need some highly trained engineers who can do the planning, but most of it after that depends on slave labor.
And you're basically doing the exact opposite of GP. Your previous post basically speculated that because some smart dudes in Rome existed who could plan and solve major engineering challenges that the average Roman pleb could do the same if he just went to school. There's no evidence of that either. Just as today's engineers are a bit above-average intelligence generally, so they probably were in ancient Rome too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:41PM
I'm not being nasty, just pointing out that the problem is multiple orders of magnitude more complex than was described. The fact that some still stand today is a testament to the fact that they just didn't whip an infinite resource of slaves into stacking stones across hillsides and river beds, and luckily didn't get them to settle the wrong way while going at a 0.1% grade for tens of miles, from bridges to tunnels, again and again.
And I see no reason to posit that the average Roman could not be trained to the same abstraction levels as the average modern person. There is no question that both the formal education, and the home from-birth exposure and environment would have to match to even stand a chance at measuring that, so it couldn't happen without a time machine. But assuming that it couldn't be true is pretty silly. I'm annoyed at anyone thinking that we are special. Taller, better equipped, and standing on the shoulders of centuries of discoveries, but not special. Heck, the Greek philosophers even knew how to be less boring than ours :)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:58PM
Better diets, less malnutrition. And now Internet access or dead tree libraries allow exposure to abstract concepts, math, and other aspects of mankind's collective knowledge from a very early age... or watch people play video games on Twitch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:04PM (1 child)
I'd be very cautious about making such a sweeping generalization about intelligence. We don't entirely agree on what intelligence is, let alone how to measure it. We use the IQ tests we have for lack of better measures, but there are several issues with them. They're heavy on mathematics, and they probably have cultural biases. Among many other things, they don't test for ability to discern what others are thinking and feeling, no "emotional quotient".
I find the results of trying to create AI to play chess most instructive. Chess was seized upon as an easy way to measure intelligence. Good chess players are smart. (However the converse is not true-- there are many smart people who suck at chess.) And so we tried for decades to make computers play chess well, on the idea that if we could do that, we would have successfully created general AI. And then, when computers finally did get so good at chess no human could beat them any more, the manner in which they succeeded at chess served to show the game is not such a good measure of intelligence as was thought. The computer chess champ was hardly more than a very, very fast brute force searcher through billions of possible chess moves.
An explanation for the Flynn effect is adaptability. If anything is adaptable, capable of learning new things, it's the young. We're constantly tweaking education, and it surely would be tweaked in directions that would help children on those tests. Those tests represent what we think intelligence is about, and therefore are a prime tool-- more than a tool, an objective in themselves-- for measuring how our education is working. Give them different tests, perhaps some sort of test of scout/wilderness savvy that would be vital to a Stone Age human, and they would probably fail spectacularly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:13PM
Exactly! IQ tests suggest that African Americans are on average 20 points less intelligent than anglo-Americans, but that has been proven entirely due to cultural appropriation factors. If you add 20 points to their score, their results are identical. If you add 30 points, they are even smarter (on average).
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:04AM
> the average 19th century person
AKA a meatbag out of the industrial revolution, which needed and trained slaves. All the same, IIRC John Taylor Gatto discussed the writings of a 9 year old miner in his essay about american education, archive.org is your friend.
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