Comments

• pixxelkick@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Exponential growth, thats about all there is to it. Advancing from clacking rocks to hunting deer is actually already a huge advancement.

  Those 190k years in caves however werent non-advancing. A lot of advancements happened over those years.

  Fires, wheels, knot tying, ceramics, pottery, grains, hunting, animal husbandry, medicine, language, art, music, rope…

  Also, 10k years is after we gained writing of various forms to store information.

  Keep in mind thats at the stage of shit like egypt, the great pyramids, etc. We were waaaaay beyond “cavemen” at that point. We already had trade routes, cities, nations, countless languages, doctors, etc.

  The big issue was before that point, all our forms of storing information were just not able to stand the test of time very well, is all. We stopped being “cavemen” way before that mark though.

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  • Norgur@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Woah there. The oldest pyramids we know of are about 5000 years old. That's halfway to 10k.

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    • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Around 10k years before us, we developed from hunter-gatherer cavemen to neolithic city builders with irrigated farms, organized religion and and a feudal society in like 1000 years. That is also pretty quick. Sure, pyramids took a bit longer. But while pyramids are pretty damn impressive, no pyramids does not mean an “uncivilized” society.

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  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Writing isn’t just storing information. It’s transmitting it across much greater distances, more times, with much less corruption.

    Oral transmission is better than nothing, but written transmission inherently has better reach. Then the printing press allowing for mass reproduction of transmission, then the internet for rapid, much more democratized transmission. It’s the spread of ideas so they can intermingle that’s the super-accelerator.

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• pyre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “something doesn’t add up”

  yes it does. that’s exactly what it is you’re describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it’s not very intuitive.

  my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:

  there’s a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there’s one, day 2 there’s two, and on day 3 there’s four… etc.

  if it 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?

  !the answer is 119.!<

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  • thirteene@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The standard story is “One Grain of Rice” jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/…/grainofrice.html

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      thanks, i love that story.

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    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Are you some kind of bot or something?

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  • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If it takes 120 days to be covered thats a huge fucking pond.

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      that is purposeful. it wouldn’t make much of a point if it took 10 days.

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    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The pond is the Pacific Ocean.

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    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nah just really small Lily pads

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  • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.

    However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we’re supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.

    People didn’t want to toil all day in someone else’s farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn’t have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.

    Once we’d been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, “progress” was inevitable.

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn’t going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.

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    • tentacles9999@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not entirely true, England just had a shit ton of trade from its colonies, and better trade led to more intense interconnection, and wealth which in the developing industrial method of production led to an explosion of capital. It was to the point the Rhodes (Rhodesia the British colony was named after him) called expansion an existential question for England, because the explosion of capital had to go somewhere. What’s nuts about capital is that it produces more capital using ever more advanced industries and methods of production. England with massive markets and capital available was able to do this to an insane degree. But still, France is something like the third wealthiest nation after US and England, so they did not do too bad for themselves, and their capital still had a field day in Africa. Highly recommend reading Marx or Lenin on imperialism, it’s legit the whole Marxist thesis how modern industry came about, and for Marx, he literally wrote Capital based on data in England. It’s absolutely fascinating how society and the economy entered a seismic shift with the advent of Captialism

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• iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  anon assumes development of science and tech is linear

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  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s exponential. The gap between 200k years ago and 10k years ago is pretty similar to the gap between 20k years ago and 1k years ago, or the difference between 2k years ago and 100 years ago. On a logarithmic scale, same distance, roughly the same delta in terms of the technology available

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    • Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Which is why I think it’s wild people want to throw on the brakes now that we’re affecting the entire earth. I mean I understand that it seems like we’ve ended up in a bad spot ecologically if you only take the last 100 years into account. But why stop right on the most toxic version of humanity? Let’s push forward to our solarpunk future as soon as possible.

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• Stern@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  start rolling down hill

  going slow

  go faster

  hmm

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• NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That most people spend most of their time passively reading celebrity news on tiny black rectangle tells you everything you need to know about the rate of human progress.

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  • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But without eleytic rectangle humans are bored… so why no electric rectangle before?

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    • suction@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What are TVs, Alex?

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• Glowstick@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The answer is probably language. Before advanced language was developed, there wasn’t a good way to pass along any knowledge that was gained by an individual.

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  • PunnyName@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And storage / dissemination of that language.

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    • muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thats why the fediverse is the next step in evolution.

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  • loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Language probably predates Homo Sapiens as our close relatives such as Homo Neandertalensis and Homo Denisova also had adaptations for articulated speech.

    www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01391-6

    Beside, populations today that have never had agriculture or traits we associate with civilization and who live secluded, like the North Sentinelese, all have languages.

    I think it’s best explained by environmental factors, rather than something interior to humanity. After all, most of human’s existence was during the Pleistocene, but all recorded history is within the Holocene (except now we’re entering the Pleistocene). Many modern studies account for the climate shifts to explain the development of agriculture:

    www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1113931109

    journals.sagepub.com/doi/…/0959683611409775

    Most traits we associate with civilization are linked to agriculture and sedentary.

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  • sinkingship@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I thought it was because proper farming.

    Like being able to support larger groups of people, where individuals could specialize in other things than hunting, gathering and whatever else was keeping the early humans busy.

    On the other hand I’ve heard we’ve been possibly farming long before 10,000 BCE.

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  • Hegar@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Language is much older than just 10k years. There's a few reasons to think that language might have developed with erectus, which could make language 10x older than the 'human specie', according to anon.

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    • Glowstick@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s why i said advanced language. Lots of animals have language.

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  • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As IoaExMachina correctly highlighted, language predates those 10k years.

    For reference, Proto-Afro-Asiatic (ancestor of Egyptian, all Semitic languages, Amazigh, plus a lot others) is believed to have been spoken 12k~18k years ago. So… like, it was already old back then, and yet it has modern descendants.

    And the role of language is probably not just communication, it’s also to formalise thought. It’s easier to think with language than without it, and you can reach more reliable conclusions.

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  • superkret@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The answer is agriculture, which lowered the standard of living and health of the individual, but sustained more people, allowed for specialization, permanent settlement and building large structures.

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  • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes there’s only one answer to how our species developed space flight

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    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      … wizards!

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It was mostly agriculture and dense human settlements, I think. Once you have someone farming enough food for themself plus someone else, that “someone else” can do something else to progress technology. Sometimes with things that allow that farmer to produce enough food for three people, then five, so goes on.

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  • Klear@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    guess what happens next

    more food and more people who came to buy the food now you need people to help make the food and keep track of the sales and now you need houses for people to live in and people to make the houses, and now there’s more people and they invent things, which makes things better and more people come and there’s more farming and more people to make more things for more people and now there’s business, money, writing, laws, power

    Society

    coming soon to a dank river valley near you

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    • Barbarian@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

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    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Right, the history of human progress is literally the history of human cooperation. As the scale of human cooperation has expanded so has the scope of the problems we can solve.

      We are actually quite close to having something resembling global consensus on a bunch of issues. It is only a handful of notable holdout states which are standing in the way of humanity effectively being able to draw down arms and focus on bigger issues.

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Kurtzgesagt

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  • Shayeta@feddit.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yup, aliens.

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

      Raising cattle is more efficient when it has its own cattle! And crops.

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• FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Shit can get pretty wild when you start writing stuff down

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  • Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Memes are pretty radical

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    • Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And much older than writing.

      en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition

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• Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  language => written down language => widespread literacy => affordable information (printing press) => internet => hypertext websites => search engines.

  we went from struggeling to keep our knowledge arround to having access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge in a mostly convenient manner.

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• FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The Pleistocene (2,580,000 - 11,700 years ago) was fucking crazy cold and had a hella unstable climate. Not a nice predictable environment.

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  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s the biggest reason why ~12,000 years ago was when modern humans really started taking off the world around. The entire planet’s climate changed in a way that made agriculture possible, and humans are really damn good at figuring out agriculture when we’re able to

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• praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • Deme@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    • first powered flight. The first humans flew in 1783 on a hot air balloon.

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    • Ummdustry@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This actually depends on your stance on oriental man-carrying kites, which have historical backing from the 6th century AD, but historians debate the exact standards of evidence.

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• bricklove@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A lot of the comments are talking about writing being the game changer but it took generations of selective breeding crops and livestock to make them viable for domestication. We haven’t found any evidence of domestication prior to about 12k years ago in archeology or genetics. There were many civilizations who built large cities and never needed a writing system.

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think it was A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry that pointed out, some of the oldest cities with any surviving architecture had stone walls ten feet thick. You don’t start with ten-foot-thick walls. You work your way up to that.

    A lot of what should be civilized history is just fuckin’ gone.

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• shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  you know how sometimes you’re trying to solve a puzzle but you’re stuck at the very beginning? You can spend hours looking at the puzzle and get nowhere. But then you spot it! the one step or the one logical conclusion you needed to advance, and you start blasting through the puzzle

  it’s that

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• kemsat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We didn’t have writing for 190k yearsiuu

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  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s exponential. The gap between 200k years ago and 10k years ago is pretty similar to the gap between 20k years ago and 1k years ago, or the difference between 2k years ago and 100 years ago. On a logarithmic scale, same distance, roughly the same delta in terms of the technology available

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    • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There is no written record of the comment.

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• j4k3@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s mostly population density and specialization. You don’t have time to think when you’re doing everything yourself. The biggest advances cone when we’re able to fund the best and brightest to basically do nothing but think.

  After getting into writing some hard science fiction futurism, I find it much more interesting that we have so very little perspective about where we exist within the present. Our technology is crap, we’re poor as fuck, there is enormous wealth that dwarfs all the wealth on Earth and a whole lot of it is quite accessible if we tried, while we haven’t even scratched the surface of the technology available within biology. Our medicine and healthcare practices are primarily based on anecdotal or correlative nonsense, low sigma test results, and cherry picked terrible science. Many of us here, myself included, are outliers that the present healthcare system fails to help. We have it better than some people in history, but worse than others. It feels like our culture has this mindset like we are the end game; no vision of the future. The only stories told are those of dystopianism. We should change that.

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  • RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, people forget that a bit over a hundred years ago, there were less than a billion people on the planet.

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  • schmorpel@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Go solarpunk!

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  • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You’re so right about healthcare. The only people who have faith in the healthcare industry have clearly never interacted with it. From the politicized researchers to the patient-facing morons it’s all mostly shit all the way down.

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  • LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But isn’t that what genres like cyberpunk do? Technological progress (A(G)I, biotech, body modifications, true VR, you name it), but society is even shittier than now? Sure, it is to some degree a cautious tale, but I feel there are quite a lot of near-future hard-ish scifi visions around

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    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What we need is near-future hard-ish sci-fi visions that view the world positively or at least as capable of change. A lot more Star Trek TNG than expanse.

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• theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because for most of it, we were living our lives, planting the trees that gave us food, protecting the animals we ate from other predators, and just living off the land. We spread over the entire world and shaped the land to better suit us

  We weren’t primitive, for millennia we turned most of the world into a paradise built for us, then tore it down in a few centuries and are now flirting with extinction

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  • dildobaggins69@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That is a lovely picture you are painting but there is certainly no evidence we “built a paradise” for ourselves. There would still be famine, struggle for resources, war and uncountable problems in the daily struggle for survival.

    It’s not as simple as “past good, present bad”.

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    • Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Also, elimination of most megafauna by overhunting, etc

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    • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There was always struggle over territory. Generally non lethal, just like predators facing off

      There was no war. War requires agriculture - an army cannot march or camp without food constantly being shipped in

      Famine also is usually due to agriculture - monocultures and short-sighted management of the environment.

      There were hard times. Droughts happened, sickness happened, people were not always very cool to each other. These things weren’t done on institutional scale, because the only institutions were meetings between groups occasionally sending representatives

      The more I learn about ancient history, the more I realize we fucked everything up societally. Technology is great, and yes we have a lot less mothers dying in childbirth… Except we didn’t for most of recorded history (and we’re backsliding), because literal childbirth in the woods was better than delivery in a hospital until a century ago

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  • nexguy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    We’ve never lived in paradise. It has always been a hard struggle not to die all this time. That struggle is easier than ever but still a struggle.

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• ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yep. For most of human history technological progress amounted to getting a little bit better at smashing slightly sharper rocks over the course of hundreds of years.

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  • Hegar@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is probably incorrect. Rocks preserve in the archaeological record so that's what we have the most evidence for.

    Increasingly sophisticated knowledge of woodworking, textile science, plant and animal biology, mathematics and astronomy were no doubt developing alongside knapping techniques, that stuff just doesn't preserve well.

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• MrJameGumb@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Hey man, there are plenty of animals on this planet that have been around longer than human beings, and I don’t see any of them writing an award winning Netflix limited series…

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  • Klear@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sharks are older than Polaris. The star…

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    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They found the perfect design and just swim all day murdering instead of paying bills by doing bullshit for decades while wearing pants. Sharks and crocodiles have had it all figured out for hundreds of millions of years.

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sharks appeared around the same time (-200MY) the solar system was last on this side of the galaxy. Crocodiles evolved when the solar system was almost (-95MY) on the other side of the galaxy. Dinosaurs ruled for 3/4 (179MY) of an entire orbit.

      The solar system orbits the galaxy once every 250MY.

      That’s. Wack.

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  • HappycamperNZ@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The hormone monsters managed…

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• SGforce@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah well. We kind of had to deal with bears the size of a fucking house for a while. At least until we wiped out their main food source. And rival hominids with at least spears.

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• general_kitten@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My own line of reasoning is that the speed of progress of technological advancement is dependent on the amount of people who can dedicate their lives to doing stuff other than trying to gather enough food and shelter to survive. So for the longest of times basically everyone had to just try to survive and maybe have an idea or two every now and then. Low human population and no-one able to dedicate themselves to innovation means extremely low innovation rate. But those rare times something really useful was developed and passed on to the next generation led to freeing more people to be able to dedicate themselves to innovation and thus increasing the amount of people one human can support with their work effort. This is a positive feedback loop so it has exponentially grown to today where one person’s work can support multiple people making theoretically most of humanity free to advance technology.

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• Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  When I think about how long it took me to realize that you’re supposed to pour tetra packs with the spout on top, I find no fault in pre modern man

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• VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We haven’t even hit the steep bit of the curve yet, wait until you see where we are by the end of this century!

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• Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Oldest stone axes are like a million years.

  We’re not the first smart species.

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• Mechaguana@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Pretty sure we had a triage stage during the whole prehistory to get to our point to randomly get an individual violent and cunning enough to survive the wilds and other competitors but helpful and sociable enough to survive within it’s tribe.

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• TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Civilization is anomalous. Yes.

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• Grayox@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Its all about building ontop of the law of adjacent possibilities, which end up becoming an S tier for progress. Of course it started out slow.

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• alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Crop domestication

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• Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Everything we do is built on top of something else. We needed to build a society capable of supporting industry and learning, then written language, mathematics etc.

  Once you have the building blocks of society, everything else comes much faster.

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• LearnedDonkey@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I would write some info. But I don't want to trigger atheists roaming these parts.

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• Kingsjack123@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So? the fact the reasoning flows is not countered by an appeal to Authority.

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