Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the knead-to-know-information dept.

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:40PM (4 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:40PM (#708431)

    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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:12PM (#708445)

    > 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

      by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:19PM (#708449)

      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)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:22PM (#708452) Journal

      You're totally Dunning-Krugering.

      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

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:41PM (#708481)

        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 :)