Missing 50,000 years

Hi,

New to this so here goes.

I take it every one knows that human history has a huge gap in it, about 50,000 years.

why did take 50,000 years to get from stick to pyramd and only 4000 years to get from pyramid to moon landing?

Hope no one is to fed up with this subject.

I would say population, travel and communication. Its like trying to save 1 million bucks the first 100,000 is a long slow process.

Good point, but I find it hard to believe that we just bumed around for that long.

Originally posted by gingern
Good point, but I find it hard to believe that we just bumed around for that long.

With population it is statistically true that there are many super geniuses in the world today compared to anytime in the past and many are advancing us in areas they only have discovered or comprehend.

With travel and communication what took months, years or never is now days, minutes or seconds.

A Biblical explanation? God decided to spread us out over the world 'Tower of Babel' to slow us down a bit that explanation was written a long time ago because they wondered too why.

Originally posted by The time lord
A Biblical explanation? God decided to spread us out over the world 'Tower of Babel' to slow us down a bit that explanation was written a long time ago because they wondered too why.

Religion almost brought us to a grinding halt. thank god for free thinkers.

Yes, population. Say I lived 50k years ago, and I came up with the idea of the pyramids? Wouldn't do a whole lot of good without 20,000 people in the vacinity to slave for 100 years to build it, or the infrastructure to feed and house those 20,000.........

I think we hit a lot of road blocks at first, the dark ages, etc. But now we know how to tear down those roadblocks.

This can be looked at the other way that evolution is leaving smarter and smarter people.

It usually only takes one or two inventions to mainstream things. Like the engine. Which now you have a tractor that can do mass farming instead of a plow or horse.

Tools are the key to the progression of human civilizations. A civilization can only grow to a point with what tools they are using. This goes along with all materials that are used to make tools, copper, iron, bronze, steel. Even our own civilization...The Western World...is beginning to reach the limits of metals and other materials that we may consider to be the best materials to use. Scientists, everyday, research new plastics, ceramics and new ways to mix metals to create new alloys for many different purposes. Coupled with new ideas and technologies such as "The Scientific Method" and the digital computer have given humans a huge boost in "trial and error" in the effrort of making tools in recent times.

Not to mention that with every modern technology you have to have many different infrastructures behind it. Just think about how many people it takes to dig up the materials used in your computer, all the manufacturers needed to form all those materials into computer components, all the people to code the software, all the information that scientist would have to discover in order to be used in the software to make it effective, and even a electrical infrastructure would be required...even if it was small and simple...a eletrical system would require many of its own base infrastructures to operate.

Do you think that any number of men with pick axes and donkeys could dig up and fill the demand of coal that is used in power plants and other purposes all over the world today? No. You need huge shovels to dig it up and with huge shovels youll need huge trucks to carry it away. Elevators to pull it up from the bottom of a shaft. If humans hand dug coal out of the earth today, civilization would stagnate, probably even start to fall apart.

There are machines and ideas that we cant build or reach today because we lack the tools we need to build the machines we need in order to make our dreams come true.

The pyramids were built with ten of thousands of workers because they lacked the tools to make the job "easier." It wouldnt require tens of thousands of people today to build the pyramids. Mechanized stone cutters, specially designed trucks to carry the stones, fleets of helicopters or maybe lifting crains to lift them up. You could build a pyramid today with a tenth of the workforce and in a fraction of the time.

[edit on 31/8/07 by Pfeil]

It's a combination of a lot of things.

As has already been pointed out in previous posts, you won't see dramatic leaps in human innovation without certain things...you need infrastructure (roads / barges / transportation of some sort), communication (the development of basic writing and mathematics at the very least), tools, and a population to use them.

I'd add one thing to the list. Innovation is dependent on prosperity. If Einstein had lived in a society where everyone had to raise their own crops, spin their own yarn, make their own clothing, he'd never have had time to do the research and the thinking that made him such a giant in modern physics. Without a very wealthy country, a person like Steven Hawking, no matter how brilliant, would never have survived to make the contributions he has.

Large-scale engineering and theoretical research are, much as we might hate to admit it, luxury items. No matter how many people you have, or tools, until your society is producing and distributing enough wealth, you aren't going to have the ability to invest in them. That 50,000 year 'gap' was humanity developing the support structure and the wealth needed. The fact that it was only 6,000 years from Giza to Tranquility Base is a reflection of the increasing ability of an increasingly industrialized society to invest in non-survival goals.

Originally posted by gingern
Hi,

New to this so here goes.

I take it every one knows that human history has a huge gap in it, about 50,000 years.

why did take 50,000 years to get from stick to pyramd and only 4000 years to get from pyramid to moon landing?

Hope no one is to fed up with this subject.

I think you can compare our technology to computer chips it grows exponentially. But then you have to take into account some "forces" that tried to slow it but think about how far we got from the 1900's till now. There are still some "forces" that try to delay it (stem cell research for example) but it will still progress. Imagine how far along we could of been along without these influences in the past and present? The future will be here and it will be WOW!!

If it hasn't been said already then I should point out that knowledge is exponentially driven - that plus, with our global market, that the very competetiveness of everything these days make it all surge forward at an incredible rate.

A prime example is the cost of a good sound system - 20/10/5/2 years ago.

I remember a TV show or film from years ago. A bunch of scientists were shown a film of an anti-gravity machine in action. It was fake but they, thinking it was possible, came up with something similar.

I recall seeing that as a kid and thinking, " Yeh, that makes sense!" - if it's been done (or seems to have been done) it can be re-created. This also explains why a lot of the best ideas are thought of at the same time by people continents apart.

.

I saw something on one of the History channels(it might have been titled ancient tech) not too long ago about some Roman who invented a "steam engine". It ended up being a toy for the Aristocracy. Slave labor was plentifull and cheap, hence no one realized its potential. Could you imagine how our world would be different if there had been something like an industrial revolution before the time of Christ?

Euripides and DaVinci spring to mind as people who were ahead of their time. Genius has been around since the first man figured out a sharp stick was better than a dull one to kill a deer. I've heard that the Romans waited until Euripides died until they finally took Syracuse (?). Genius is genius no matter what time they exist in, they will always make a contribution to their clan, tribe, nation. I'm sure that there are thousands of less known visionaries who have brought us to where we are today.

The geniuses who impress and inspire me the most are Euripides, DaVinci, and Tesla. One must wonder how far man advanced in prehistoric times before some catastrophe (Deluge), intervention (Babel), or self-destruction (that Indian story i can't remember right now, or Atlantean myth) set us back.

(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. [10] Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. [11] There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.



[edit on 1-9-2007 by jefwane]

reply to post by gingern

What's missing from those 50,000 years is documentary and archaeological evidence. Documentary evidence is missing because no-one had invented writing yet. Archaeological evidence is scarce because, the further back in time you go, the more what's in the earth gets mixed up, sucked down, washed away and crunched over due to tectonic processes, glaciation, erosion and agriculture.

Our ancestors certainly weren't bumming around all that time. They colonized the planet, starting out from Africa -- maybe as long as 150,000 years ago -- and got as far as Australia by the beginning of the 50,000-year period you refer to. Some time after that they colonized the whole of the Americas as well as the Pacific, becoming effectively a global species. They developed a technology of fire and learnt to work wood, stone and metal, producing remarkably well-finished, often intricate and very beautiful objects. They learnt pottery and weaving. They taught themselves to paint -- in some cases, like that of the artist or artists of Lascaux, to produce sophisticated, lifelike images. They probably invented music around this time, too, though sadly we don't know much about that because musical instruments -- apart from bone flutes, maybe -- don't fossilize. They learnt to farm, to live in settled communities, to sail the seas. They learnt, perhaps, to trade. They invented society with its kings and priests, its laws and customs. They learnt to make weapons, and war.

Above all they evolved language and developed it to an almost incredible degree of sophistication, elaboration and subtlety. It is widely and, I think, correctly believed that it was language that made all these other inventions possible.

I don't know about there being so much of a gap, anyway. What happened during those 50,000 years is pretty well known, though when and where a particular thing first happened is not always identifiable and there are the usual gaps in our knowledge.

By the way, 4,000 years is a rather arbitrary upper limit. By that time the first pyramids had already been built. Civilization of one sort or another had been in existence since about 5,500 BC! Writing and all that other stuff I've described above had already been invented. We have plenty of evidence of all this -- we're talking history here, not prehistory. What's special about 2,000 BC?


[edit on 2-9-2007 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by gingern
Hi,

New to this so here goes.

I take it every one knows that human history has a huge gap in it, about 50,000 years.

why did take 50,000 years to get from stick to pyramd and only 4000 years to get from pyramid to moon landing?

Hope no one is to fed up with this subject.

Great post. I often think about the huge gaps in the past that we've no knowledge of. Which 50.000 years are you talking about though? I've a feeling that humans have advanced to this stage before, perhaps even better and were wiped out or destroyed themselves leaving not a trace, or so little trace it's easily covered up. It could explain some of today's advances. Maybe some technology survived and it's classified as above top secret?

The rate at which technology grows is exponential. Take computers for example, every time a new computer is released on the market it is almost already outdated because companies are always working on the next most powerful chip

Originally posted by OzWeatherman
The rate at which technology grows is exponential. Take computers for example, every time a new computer is released on the market it is almost already outdated because companies are always working on the next most powerful chip

Do I hear an echo in here?

reply to post by jefwane



you are partially correct, it WAS due to slave labor, in the past MANUAL labor was considered "beneath one" it was the job of slave, so it was the mental sciences that took forefront. There was no "scientific methodology" because to do so would required working with your hands (manually). This was explained in a treatise a few years ago on the web I think ( I will try to find it again ) the was a society that didn't have slaves and had equality for women but was wiped out by a Volcano, otherwise Human advancement may have happened 2000 or so years earlier.

when I find the reference I will post it, this will drive me crazy til I do

Just as in daily life, You learn something that at one time you didn't know, then after a while you take what you learned and find a way to do it better, With each step mankind makes the next step gets easier and easier.

Evolution excelerates, Right now things are moving steady tech wise, but at the same time we are getting to a point there Isn't much more we can do aside from just perfecting what we already know, I would guess the next "step" we make will be beyond what we can currently imagine.


[edit on 3-9-2007 by C0le]

There are those who claim (one being Edgar Cayce) that Humankind has been on the Earth for over 10,000,000 years and within this period many great civilizations have risen and fallen e.g. the legends of Atlantis & Lemuria or the ancient Indian Vedic literature that describes their flying machines are but a few examples.

It seems we have had to start over many many times, if you believe these so called legends. So the 50,000 years you speak of may just have been a rebuilding period from a former glory. Maybe so, I'm not claiming it to be fact, but each individual should do his own studies and come to their own conclusions.