So easy a caveman can do it

Pre-historic Man, we stereotype them as living in caves and grunting. Were they more advanced and sophisticated then we give them credit for? Far from being the violent brutes they are traditionally depicted, Ancient Humans had sophisticated mathematical and astrological knowledge, including an understanding of the precession of the equinoxes.

Ancient Humans were around for hundreds of thousands of years.They were fairly intelligent -- we cannot say for certain how bright or stupid they were, but they survived in some real tough places for a very, very long time. I doubt they were stupid. What condemns them in our eyes is that their tools changed so little over time, and their standard of living left no marks on the earth. Why didn't they make a better knife, where are their structures, and why don't we have their writings and statues to ponder?

Or DO we?

Also changing current beliefs was the discovery of a toe bone that indicated that the person wore shoes. This makes the theory of when humans began wearing showing shoes date back 10,000 more years than previously thought.

_toe

The 5000 year old golden eye

70,000 year old artifacts and snake statue

Jericho has three separate settlements have existed at or near the current location for more than 11,000 years. These all show a sophisticated level of a civilization.

The oldest granary yet found, for instance, dates back to 9500 BC and is located in the Jordan Valley.

75,000-year-old beads found in Africa

50,000 year old flute

Just how far back one can go keeps on being pushed back with discoveries made everyday.

Originally posted by PontiacWarrior

Ancient Humans were around for hundreds of thousands of years.
They were fairly intelligent --
I doubt they were stupid.
What condemns them in our eyes is that their tools changed so little over time, and their standard of living left no marks on the earth.
...

it seems early mankind deliberately kept 'culture' as their driving force
rather than subcumbing to 'advancement' through 'civilization'.

a wise choice imho.
living 'green' is something we modern societies are trying to re-capture

one could say our ancestors were primitive, but i suggest they were
living a lot more harmoneously in their environment that we are now with all our life extending RXs & technology.....Amen

Human civilization did not just blossom towards the end of the Neolithic, it was just a convergence or tipping point where enough cultural patterns built up enough to create more rapidly progressive societies. Really that is all there is to it.

Humans are opportunists and problem solvers... we saw a niche we could exploit to our advantage (agriculture, domestic animals etc) took it, new problems rose from that (excess crops, grain and the like) and so we solved those problems and new ones appeared and so on and so forth.

We do the same thing today. The only difference is that we have built up so many different cultural patterns that it doesn't seem amazing as it once did.

I think we must keep an open mind to the idea that we are not currently living in the first advanced civilization. We could just currently be at a high point before "dark ages" that may last a million years at a time. Question. How much evidence of a steel and glass structure would remain after a million years?

Truely, no imperical evidence exists and I am not sayinf it is true. But mankind in these dark ages may have kept some verbal history, they knew they were from somewhere and somehow..

reply to post by Tinhatman


Here is a link to a thread of mine that discusses that very issue.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Don't confuse survival instinct with civilization. Huge difference. Mankind reached a point that cooperation yielded better results than going alone. This lead to early civilization.

As for "ancient civilizations" more advanced than today. No proof, lots of speculation and theories. Rocks piled on top of one another means... someone knew how to stack rocks. Not a big leap in engineering with this.

Pyramids, on the other hand, shows what civil engineering with public works money of the day, can do with a large work force that is idle in off season from agriculture.

But how does one define advanced? Does having a microwave make us more advanced? I agree there are many things we can do today that couldn't be done then, but even our architects and engineers are puzzled and amazed by ancient mans knowledge, a lot is only be rediscovered.

Gigantiga and the Megalithic Temples on Malta 4th to 3rd millennium BC

The Enigmas of Stonehenge 3rd to 2nd millennium BC

Agriculture, fishing, hunting, ancient humans were content with this way of life then a sudden spark. I want to stress that Ancient humans were intelligent, advanced and sophisticated, and not much credit or props is given to them. We might consider our selves more advanced than the ancients, but without computers, machines, cell phones, food processing plants, no modern person would know what to do, let alone survive.

i think they were intelegent too

Originally posted by PontiacWarrior
But how does one define advanced? Does having a microwave make us more advanced? I agree there are many things we can do today that couldn't be done then, but even our architects and engineers are puzzled and amazed by ancient mans knowledge, a lot is only be rediscovered.

This is more an effect of our eduction than anything else.

If you study math, from simple 1+2 to algorithms, advanced equations, hell even stellar drift and take a look at Stonehenge, what do you know?

Absolutely nothing. Your knowledge is irrelevant. They knew that the sun passed certain places of the sky at certain times of the year. And that's it! There's little knowledge about it: Its observation.

And in the actual design of things (such as the great pyramid) its hundreds of years of trial and error instead of some egyptian mathematic suddenly getting a lightbulb over his head.

IMO the only reason ancient man amaze us is because modern man is unable to put himself in ancient mans position.

The first thing a modern engineer getting the task to build a pyramid would say is: "Where's our GPS?"

Originally posted by St Udioone could say our ancestors were primitive, but i suggest they were
living a lot more harmoneously in their environment that we are now with all our life extending RXs & technology.....Amen

Go into the hills and go on an archaeological dig. You'll quickly find out that their idea of "living green" was:

* There's communal toilet pits which may or may not be near water and which may dump waste material into stream.
* Houses and shelters were kept clean by throwing everything into a garbage pit... or simply throwing them out the door.
* If someone didn't need something, they threw it away out onto the landscape.
* you cut down trees till they were gone and then you moved on.
* you prepared land by burning the grasses and trees and didn't put fires out (there's lots of evidence of the slash-and-burn technology among the ancient California Indians.)
* you did not restrict your hunts to male adult animals. You killed whatever you could find.

The only reason it looks "green" and "respectful of the land" is that the population density was so low. We kept those habits when we moved into cities... and as a result, we had human waste in streets and garbage all over the place and when it rained, it all flowed down into streams and into the poorer parts of town.

Modern humans are far "greener" than the ancestors.

Originally posted by PontiacWarriorAgriculture, fishing, hunting, ancient humans were content with this way of life then a sudden spark.

It was called "the Hypsithermal" and was a period of sudden climate change. As places got dryer and warmer, humans were forced into river valleys where they came in more frequent contact with each other and had to deal with how to create living spaces and food storage spaces as well as food production. That's when you see a rise in innovation. It begins about 10,000 years ago.

I'm of the opinion that our brains didn't rapidly evolve in the last few thousand years.

However, technology evolved much slower.

So, if you're being raised before the dawn of history how would life be different.

First, you'd most likely live in a hunter gatherer society. So, you'll spend a few hours a day, on most days, to hunt gather and cook the days food. You'd be, most likely, nomadic in that you'd follow the herds. So, you wouldn't build big houses. Instead, you'd either have portable shelters, or have camps set up along the way or you'd be able to fashion shelters from readily available materials.

Not a bad life. You'd go up to the cool mountains in the summer and back to the warmer plains in the winter. You'd have a lot of time on your hands to make, your clothes, and your arrows or spears and time to practice.

So I think that ancient man figured out how to live in harmony with his environment, wore well made clothes that were fit for his purposes, had well crafted implements when necessary and overall had a great life.

However this type of lifestyle would leave a pretty small footprint for the archaelogist to look at. I can remember when they found the iceman in the alps how surprised they were about the quality of his clothes and other goods. I wasn't .

The idea that early humans lived a "green" life in harmony with nature is a very common mis-notion.

Our "green" forefathers used many "over-kill" hunting techniques on the worlds megafauna, with many sites in North America. This combined with very drastic climate changes, yes they had bigger suv's back then also , and a very good possibility of diseases from mass migrations drove the largest mass extinction in human history. Don't forget in North America there is growing evidence of a comet "hit" just under 13,000 years ago also.


I agree with Byrd that you should really see for yourself what it is like working a midden heap, or a kill pit. Very scary thought to live in the paleolithic world. Upper paleolithic life expectancy was mid 20's with "old" being in the 30's, how many of you want to trade our 70+ years for a fast 20 something?

Easy life you say? Take a long hard look at the bones of our leisure time stroll to and fro ancestors and you will see the evidence of a harsh often brutal reality. Abscessed teeth, and other "minor" injuries or infections claimed many of them. Megafauna was not docile either! Oh, remind me once again why wolves were hunted to near extinction in Europe and most of North America in "modern" times. Try living in a world with mega-predators!

Did we even talk about infant mortality rates or maternal mortality? Well then we need to remember that with no canning or refrigeration very few foods keep well. So just a few hours a day hunting and cooking, you're crazy. Famine and starvation were the norm not the exception! The growth plates of our paleolithic pals show many more lean times than feast times.

Our ancestors had to compete for survival not tree-hug for survival. They did not have speed, claws, teeth, strength or size. They had intelligence and a sophisticated social/cultural system.

My Masters Dissertation was about human evolution and the idea that we are not descendants of the big dumb "Ugh" brute but from the "geek caveman". Thinking and planning not brute force or strolling up and down the mountains led to our existence.

Keep it, Casual

I was reading something today that seemed relevant to this topic: Minerava

At the heart of this new Lower Palaeolithic ‘out of Africa’ village theory are two world-changing ideas. First, that Homo erectus, Upright Man, had far more modernistic tendencies than previously believed; and second, that as unique as the farming villages of Jericho in the West Bank and Catalhoyük in Turkey are, their occupants were not the brains behind the origins of sedentism. The innovative capacity of Homo erectus has challenged scholars for decades and remains a scholarly cauldron. Anthropologists such as Richard Leakey have long insisted that Upright Man was socially more akin to modern humans than to his primitive predecessors because the increased cranial capacity coincided with more sophisticated tool technology. Other scientists contend that Homo erectus was sufficiently advanced to have even mastered maritime transport. Yet both this assertion and the very idea that he ever got to grips with controlled fire are still considered controversial.

Enjoy!

Originally posted by CasualOne
The idea that early humans lived a "green" life in harmony with nature is a very common mis-notion.

Sure is but it was certainly closer to green than what we are doing now!

Our "green" forefathers used many "over-kill" hunting techniques on the worlds megafauna, with many sites in North America. This combined with very drastic climate changes, yes they had bigger suv's back then also

, and a very good possibility of diseases from mass migrations drove the largest mass extinction in human history.

I don't know how about largest but i do know that big game did supposedly as good as disappear from the North American continent within i think a thousand years after we arrived. The people did notice their effect on nature and did change their ways afterwards resulting , as i understand, in the modern far 'greener' North American Indian approach to living off the land.

Don't forget in North America there is growing evidence of a comet "hit" just under 13,000 years ago also.

I will take your word for that at this time.

I agree with Byrd that you should really see for yourself what it is like working a midden heap, or a kill pit. Very scary thought to live in the paleolithic world. Upper paleolithic life expectancy was mid 20's with "old" being in the 30's, how many of you want to trade our 70+ years for a fast 20 something?

Thus not so different from the life expectancies of the early industrial age, yesterday ? Will anyone argue that life on the open plains of North American was not in fact better than Britain for most of the last four hundred odd years?

Easy life you say? Take a long hard look at the bones of our leisure time stroll to and fro ancestors and you will see the evidence of a harsh often brutal reality.

Far, FAR less brutal than Britain in 17th and 18th centuries...

Abscessed teeth, and other "minor" injuries or infections claimed many of them.

We have perfectly good evidence that they knew how to deal with minor injuries and their sanitary conditions were very good hence the devastation European disease wrought on them later on.

Megafauna was not docile either! Oh, remind me once again why wolves were hunted to near extinction in Europe and most of North America in "modern" times. Try living in a world with mega-predators!

Rather Mega fauna than a factory boss with well armed goons, your still better armed than predator and smarter too and the biggest threat to you will always be those few humans who wish to exploit you to death.

Did we even talk about infant mortality rates or maternal mortality?

Far, far higher for most of industrial age.

Well then we need to remember that with no canning or refrigeration very few foods keep well.

You can preserve meat for a very long time if you understand some basics and people still did it fifty years ago.

Did we even talk about infant mortality rates or maternal mortality?

Both lower then than during most other periods of modern ( last ten thousand years or so) history...

Well then we need to remember that with no canning or refrigeration very few foods keep well.

Meat was consumed relatively quickly and since meat was rarely anything but the difference between living well and prospering it's not as critical as some would like to suggest.

So just a few hours a day hunting and cooking, you're crazy.

Actually hunter gatherers gathered far more than they hunted and as always women gathered and basically provided the constant sustenance that enabled hunting excursions and male pride in general.

Famine and starvation were the norm not the exception!

Famine and starvation become the norm when people stopped living within the means of their environments and instead bargained on consistent high yields which the land never could sustain in the long or even short run.

The growth plates of our paleolithic pals show many more lean times than feast times.

There is a vast difference between lean times and the outright and consistent episodes of starvation that plagued humanity the last few thousand years.

Our ancestors had to compete for survival not tree-hug for survival.

Compete with who? I don't like the Utopian nonsense about history some Greens wants to indoctrinate people with but we don't have misrepresent history either...

They did not have speed, claws, teeth, strength or size. They had intelligence and a sophisticated social/cultural system.

And in certain parts of Africa grown male Lions are hunted as part of a initiation rite...

My Masters Dissertation was about human evolution and the idea that we are not descendants of the big dumb "Ugh" brute but from the "geek caveman". Thinking and planning not brute force or strolling up and down the mountains led to our existence.

Keep it, Casual

And that must have been a while ago as the books i have read strongly suggest to me that this issue was settled some time ago.

Stellar