Scientists claim that modern humans have existed for approximately 100 000 years. If you went back in time and picked up a new born from 100 000 years ago, brought it back to today, and raised it in a modern setting with modern education, it should have no problem integrating into and contributing to our society.

So why did we spend the majority of the last 100 000 years as cavepeople?

>writing didn't exist, so we could pass down information
Why did it take so long to develop writing? We were painting on cave walls 10s of 1000s of years ago. Besides, there's plenty of ideas, including relatively complex ones, that can be passed down orally (key word there: relatively. don't @ me how we wouldn't be able to build nuclear power plants or travel to the moon without writing)

The way I see it there's 3 possible explanations:
- Scientists are simply incorrect about the age of modern humans; and our ancestors from 100 000 years ago were closer to chimps in intelligence, and it's more like 10 000 years since we develop modern intellect. This is an obviously problematic possibility, as it raises a lot of talking points for racists when it comes to groups like Indigenous Australians.
- There were complex societies in prehistory and people like Graham Hancock have legitimate points
- Creation myths like that in the Old Testament should be taken more seriously and humanity, if not the world, are a lot younger than academia believes

>>17900340 (OP)
>why did we spend the majority as cave people
you can go take a look at anybody who actually attempted to start a garden, with all the knowledge and advancments made with plant growing, take note of the typical failure rate, and you will quickly realized why it took so long

Technology and knowledge are an exponential factor. If I gave you one dollar and told you to leverage it into a million dollars it would probably take you your entire life. If I gave you a million dollars and told you to leverage it into 2 million dollars you could probably do it pretty quickly.

>>17900340 (OP)
>Besides, there's plenty of ideas, including relatively complex ones, that can be passed down orally
Not really. People often exaggerate the abilities of oral cultures. Oral traditions very quickly become corrupted over time, because humans aren't good at remembering things. More importantly, once information gets forgotten and disappears from the tradition, you have no way of getting it back. The sorts of traditions that oral societies transmit tend to be very formulaic stories that are characterized by familiar tropes and topoi that can be easily remembered and improvised upon when you're retelling the story. You simply don't transmit complex information that way. It doesn't matter if an oral performer changes a detail in a story because the audience is not going to remember the last way they told the story, but if you're actually trying to get something practical done, it's actually important that you remember everything correctly.

Your second explanation is most likely the correct one.

you are literally illiterate on anthropology holy shit

>>17900340 (OP)
ice age

>>17900340 (OP)
Technology and science grow exponentially and they start excruciatingly slow.

>>17900340 (OP)
It's the second one

>>17900340 (OP)
Survival demands prioritized immediate needs over cultural or technological innovation. Complex societies only emerged after agriculture stabilized food supplies around 10,000 years ago.

>>17900340 (OP)
It took pretty long for humanity to reach population level where anykind of civilizational structure beoynd "tribe" was needed. 75k years ago a supervolcano explosion almost wiped us off the globe. Only 10k survivor were left, lurking somewhere in Southeast Asia mostly. Pretty much everyone who is not African (and many of them too!) Descends from that tiny population.

The earth and humanity are 6259 years old.

>>17900902
Nope, it's 6258. Enjoy Hell!

The garden of eden describes the begin of civilisation 10,000 years ago

Wheels existed for millenia as well as luggage existed for millenia

But only in the 1970s the science advanced far enough to combine them two

>>17900391
>For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

>>17900372
This makes sense if we only look 10,000 years back but isnt it a bit absurd that it took 90,000 years for some fuckwit to figure out that seeds make crops?

In parts of the world with fertile soil and frequent rain, they didnt even have to worry about any other aspects of farming. If even a single cunt deliberately took a seed and planted it in the dirt, it would have started the agricultural revolution

>>17900340 (OP)
>Scientists claim that modern humans have existed for approximately 100 000 years. If you went back in time and picked up a new born from 100 000 years ago, brought it back to today, and raised it in a modern setting with modern education, it should have no problem integrating into and contributing to our society.
Name one.

>>17900340 (OP)
Without literacy it's difficult to make technological inventions, even more so if you are nomadic hunter with simple tools at your disposal.
However, there is some indication that tool making might be older than we think, pre-Australopithecus.

>>17900340 (OP)
How many things have (You) invented? 0?

>>17900340 (OP)
Monkeys turning into people is materialistic mythology. Abiogenesis and the whole tree of life is fantasy too and contrary to what the fossil record shows which is explosions of life without precursors.

>>17901472
It's more that there are gaps. There are gaps when trying to find direct lineages of animals, gaps when it comes to Cambrian and Ediacaran fauna (I would say it's the biggest gap from multicellular but simple life to animals, where you can debate if that fossils is oldest known sponge or just some funny rock), but despite the gaps you can see them evolving.

Africa is ironically the worst place to start civilization for multiple reasons, so really that limits us to 70,0000 years ago.
After that there is the question of the ice age, we were too busy hunting and eating all day.
Thereafter it is only around 10,000 bc permanent settlements of humans became concrete outside Africa.
So really it took 10,000 years for humans to develop.
Any questions?

I'm sure there were groups of humans that attempted forms of agriculture say 50,000 years ago, but it only takes a group of raiders to easily overwhelm your humble proto-farm and take/destroy everything, setting humanity collectively back by thousands of years.

>>17901371
Quoting ancient people is not an argument. Socrates was completely ignorant of all the anthropological research that has been done on oral cultures. He is just dead wrong here.

>>17900340 (OP)
>the last ice age ends, temperatures rise
>climate becomes suitable for agriculture
>agriculture is refined until some areas are capable of sustaining permanent settlements
>settlements grow into cities, which allow for specialized laborers and demand more complex social organization
>specialized laborers and intellectuals start to gather more and more knowledge in their respective fields, increasing total knowledge over time
>cities conquer other cities and form larger, more complex entities
>knowledge keeps growing and growing
There is your very anti-climatic answer OP

>>17900391
Oral traditions are more trustworthy than you might think. Look into for example the tradition of men memorizing the entire Quran. They are shockingly accurate. I don't remember the term but there's a term for it and they're held in great esteem. They are sometimes tested in contests, I saw something where they did that on Turkish TV.

>>17900340 (OP)
But the Earth's sediment tells a different story regarding the geological timescale. Unless you think humans were brought here by aliens.

>>17901361
This is just a compact version of a small wagon and a wheelbarrow. Both of which existed for thousands of years

>>17901539
>Africa is ironically the worst place to start civilization
You think the climate in Africa today is the same as it was tens of thousands of years ago?

>>17901741
The Quran thing doesnt really count cause everyone just learns it directly from the book rather than it getting past from mouth to mouth.

With oral tradition, if you forget anything, mishear anything or deliberately change anything, that information is completely gone. Theres no book to fall back on for corrections

>>17901383
Seeds make crops, but how do you assure that soil remains fertile after a few years of use? How do you keep food for the times of year food does not grow? how do you protect your crops from other people and animals? What makes that lifestyle better than living as a hunter-gatherer? (after all they generally were taller and got more calories than the earliest farmers) if someone else is doing it, why not just steal from that idiot instead of joining them?
There's so much more to agriculture than just putting seeds in the ground. There's also the question of was it really better for the majority of people? It might be better for society as a whole, but for the majority of individual it was probably a worse life

>>17900391
>because humans aren't good at remembering things.
There was serbian rhapsodes during the XX century singing about Troy, nigger

>>17900340 (OP)
>The most recent ice age, known as the Last Glacial Period, lasted from approximately 115,000 years ago to 11,700 years ago.
I don't know much about anthropology but this seems conveniently placed to have had something to do with it.

>>17901383
>>17901844
Early settled society sucked and people basically had to be enslaved into it so they wouldn't just go back to hunter gathering. Makes sense it took so long to get established when the most obvious alternative that you've already been doing is seemingly superior.

>ice age ends
>suddenly all the big walking food sources die out
>ppl get the wise idea to stay in one place and maintain a food supply instead of traveling for it

>>17901386
The esteemed historian Richard Dawkins in the God Delusion

>>17900340 (OP)
climate.

>>17901926
Glacial period, not ice age. We're still in an ice age, but it's also an interglacial period.

>>17900340 (OP)
>Why did it take so long to develop writing? We were painting on cave walls 10s of 1000s of years ago.
People normally don't invent things they don't need. Almost all the skills needed to survive as hunter gatherers could be passed down orally. In fact many skills like making arrowheads would be much easier to learn from someone than to learn from a book. The earliest proto-writing systems only emerged when people had so much stuff they needed to keep track of it, like flocks of animals. And the first writing systems, coming from pictographs that had to be carved or notched into clay, were complicated and expensive to learn, so written language could only be of use to an elite, and only became common once societies reached a level where they had a large permanent elite class that had to keep track of things.

>>17901741
This is a common mistake that Muslim apologists make. The Quran was not really transmitted orally. It was written down very early, as early as Muhammad’s lifetime. When people traditionally memorize the Quran, they memorize it from a written text or these days they might listen to a recording. It’s very easy to remember and preserve something when you can read or listen to it over and over again and it’s guaranteed to be exactly the same every time. That’s why it’s easy for us to remember song lyrics. However, in an oral society you don’t have that luxury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity#Theories_and_models