Technology

[OldWiseGuy]

Why wouldn't the earliest man have discovered and utilized fire? Were there no wild fires back then?

 

[Paulos23]

Why wouldn't the earliest man have discovered and utilized fire? Were there no wild fires back then?

Man had to learn to make fire to best utilize it, it is a hard thing to carry around and keep fed. Not saying they didn't use wild fire, but wild fire doesn't happen as often as one would like if you are looking for a source of fire.

Plus wild fires tend to burn everything that is burnable in the area so it makes it hard to keep a fire going. You would have to take it to an area where there is fuel for it.

 

[Paulos23]

Aside from the exponential nature of learning, I think the most important aspect of "why did it take so long" is: available time and resources for research and experimentation.

In a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society, they can only own as much as they can carry. There is very little planning for long term survival. Most, if not everything, is about having food today, next week and / or at best, for the winter.

While in such living conditions, there is also a slow increase of knowledge concerning the fabrication of practical and rudimentary tools, there is no time or room to "think outside the box" and test a few creative ideas, or try to answer a few difficult questions.

Chimpansees instinctively exhibit such behaviour in psychological experiments. They ARE a lot more intelligent then people tend to think. You can learn them things about tool use and such that they will pick-up on and use. But if what you are learning them can't be linked directly to rather immediate results (getting food for example), they lose interest quite rapidly.

Once people started settling down and discovering the basic principles of agriculture, something unprecedented happened: people started to own more then they can carry. The idea of "private and public owned property" surfaced. Now, keeping track of your inventory becomes important. What's a good way of doing that? Marks. Symbols. Writing.

Now that people start to work the land, they quickly gain new knowledge and experience about that.

As they become better at it, crops become better and more food is available.
More "easy" food = less resources and time required for hunting and gathering.

With more time on their hands, people have more time to use building their house, gaining experience and knowledge in construction as well as to simply study things out of curiosity.

Also, now that they are settled in one spot, they also have the opportunity to work for weeks, months on something. This allowed for "bigger projects", which again is easy to see how it would gain them new knowledge and experience. Learn by doing.

Fascinating subject though.

Right settling down to farm allowed people to speculize in non-food gathering skills. Not as much as today, but enough to get the ball roling faster.

 

[Paulos23]

Not only about their religious belief, but also about their skills in astronomy.

Really, I bet that if a time machine COULD be invented and people would travel back into this time period, they would be amazed by the stuff those people already could do. Chances are, they had some skills that we today have long forgotten.

Flint knapping, for example, is a really hard skill to learn. There were places full of knapping residue, far more than any tribe could house, which even speaks for a real industry and trade networks.

I think your right. We also have to remember they had different goals, they where trying to survive and live, not to make a high-tech socety. Things went a long time with things being good enough until someone said "here is an improvement". And when old tried and true worked for generations, something new may take a while to catch on.

 

[SkyWriting]

Science would tell us that our ancestors from 100000 years ago had marginally less intellect than today.

Everyone agrees the premise is flawed.
Research suggests ancient man was brilliant.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Everyone agrees the premise is flawed.
Research suggests ancient man was brilliant.

There's also a big difference between having a high IQ and actually knowing stuff.

A guy with an IQ comparable to that of Einstein or Hawking, but living in the stone age, would not invent a smartphone. The guy who invents the smartphone, won't necessarily be more of a genius then that stone age einstein.

As for me, I see no reason to assume that homo sapiens of 100.000 years ago was any less (or more) intellectual then the homo sapiens of today.

Anatomically, we are as good as identical. I'ld assume that the mental capacities we possess today are largely the same as of our ancestors all those millenia ago.

The main difference between us and them is knowledge about the world. Science.

 

[Mr Strawberry]

As for me, I see no reason to assume that homo sapiens of 100.000 years ago was any less (or more) intellectual then the homo sapiens of today.

I think the idea is that that domestication has the effect of reducing brain size.

Your Brain Is Smaller Than a Caveman?s. Here?s Why - Businessweek

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Man had to learn to make fire to best utilize it, it is a hard thing to carry around and keep fed. Not saying they didn't use wild fire, but wild fire doesn't happen as often as one would like if you are looking for a source of fire.

Plus wild fires tend to burn everything that is burnable in the area so it makes it hard to keep a fire going. You would have to take it to an area where there is fuel for it.

Did you see the movie, "Quest for Fire"? They carried embers with them to start fires. I'm guessing that early man noticed that friction could produce high temperatures and developed that means of starting fires.

 

[AV1611VET]

I'm guessing that early man noticed that friction could produce high temperatures and developed that means of starting fires.

"Early man"* were metallurgists.

Genesis 4:22a And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron:

* More appropriately, "Earlier men."

 

[Belk]

I have a question for the atheists/agnostics. Its more philosophical than scientific.

What does being an arthiest have to do with this question?

Science would tell us that our ancestors from 100000 years ago had marginally less intellect than today.

No it wouldn't.

Given that, why would it be only the last 5000 years that technology picked up speed? 95000 years of hunter gathering seems like an awfully long preamble. People could have discovered fire, tools, agriculture, and simple engineering long ago, yet didn't.

Yes, they did actually.

Similarly, its curious that the Earth has had with animals with some intelligence and the manual dexterity to manipulate their environment for many millions of years. Yet it was only humans that developed technology. Use of technology is a survival advantage, but only one of many. So why now and not back then?

Because there always has to be a first and we are it. This is like asking why animals did not walk until they learned to walk.