I imagine a lot of boredom (besides staying alive), helps finding out stuff. I can also imagie, that they had basic roles in a group, where people were designated “mess around with stuff and discover things, aka proto scientists”
Comment on Prehistoric shitposting
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What I don’t get is how ancient humans figured out more complex stuff. Like neanderthals learned how to make a glue to hold their weapons together. It was probably a simple method, like this article talks about, but it still took a lot of planning and also a lot of basic reasoning before trying it themselves if it was even something that could be done.
Rubanski@lemm.ee 10 months ago
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m sure that’s a big part of it, but it still amazes me the things they figured out how to achieve artificially, especially when they had no natural analogue. Like who figured out how to brew beer?
ReCursing@kbin.social 10 months ago
Stir the drink with the magic stick and wait a few days and it goes bubbly, tastes better, and stops poisoning people
Slovene@feddit.nl 10 months ago
I’m not saying it was aliens, but …
It was aliens.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yearly1845@reddthat.com 10 months ago
SUPREME commander.
ExLisper@linux.community 10 months ago
I would say it a combination of two things:
Combine this and you have 300.000 years of very slow but steady progress fuelled by chance discoveries and occasional geniuses.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oh I’m certainly aware of the second part. It still astounds me that they were able to figure out things like that without just observing the natural world. Here’s another example, although it may not apply to the early agricultural world because I don’t know when it was first cultivated. Who figured out that the leaves of rhubarb were poison and the stalks are only edible with further processing? According to Wikipedia, it’s been cultivated for at least 1800 years. How do you figure out, “well, this is making people sick, but what if we just ate the stems but cooked them a whole lot first?”
teejay@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I would imagine a lot of it has to do with food scarcity. There weren’t trucks and boats and planes to fly food back then. You had to eat what was available in your specific patch of dirt. If there aren’t a lot of options, and what is available can make you sick, you might start trying to prepare it and eat it in different ways until it stops making you sick.
For most people, rhubarb is one of hundreds of options of things to buy from a grocery store. To our ancient ancestors, it may have been one of a small handful of things that grow where they live, and therefore a necessity to figure out how to eat it.
Signtist@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I eat raw rhubarb all the time. I usually pull a stalk off to munch on as I mow the lawn. They probably just ate the stalk first, enjoyed it, and some stopped there, while others didn’t. Doesn’t take much more experimentation than that to learn that the stalks are edible and tasty, while the leaves aren’t.
ExLisper@linux.community 10 months ago
Yeah, animals know what plants to avoid. I would say that when it comes to what was poisonous monkeys already knew that and people didn’t have to rediscover it.