I did a poop once. A very big one. It was a pivotal moment in the history of my ass.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Cleopatra lived closer to the discovery of electricity than To the building of the pyramids
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Human beings have been around, in their current state of intellectual capacity for well over 100,000 years.
Looking at all that we've accomplished in just the last 10,000 years of known history...it is not unreasonable to assume that we could have accomplished just as much several times over already...but for whatever reason the knowledge of those accomplishments have been repeatedly erased from history.
I'm gonna piggy back mine on this one. Before the invention of writing, the only new thoughts you could ever encounter, were from the people you would meet face to face.
To further this, there probably was a long time before humans developed sophisticated language. Imagine what a game changer that must have been. It is still engraved in our cultural memory in the form of the wizard doing magic by simply saying certain words.
there probably was a long time before humans developed sophisticated language.
Homo Erectus was the longest living human ever, lasting about 1.5 million years before going extinct about 115,000 years ago. Their bones have been found on Crete, which means that they likely had the intelligence to walk out of Africa and build a boat or raft for island-hopping from Greece. However, even building a raft requires a sophisticated language. So our ancestors have been conversing for a very long time. They also harnessed fire and invented cooking, so Homo Sapiens aren't all that special.
Happy cake day!
Thank you, cake sounds like a good idea 😊
You know that the rate of discoveries & innovations accelerates in history, to the point that the last century was more knowledge created than all of humanity before? Exactly.
Can't invent much if all you have is a sharp stone and very limited understanding of nature.
We use terms like "stone age" and "iron age" because those are materials that lasted long enough for us to see them. Wood, fabric, rope, animal hide, many other materials don't last that long so we have much less information about what people were doing with them.
That's actually not true. Even steel girders will dissolve to rust within a few hundred years, if left to the elements. Fossils are a 1 in a million occurrence that require precise conditions in order to happen. In conditions that are less than ideal, there would be zero evidence of anything we have built in the last few thousand years without constant maintenance.
Only stone endures long enough to last longer than that, and we tend to harvest stone to build new things, every time we find old things made out of it. So everything that would have otherwise lasted, could have easily been recycled so many times over, that it's completely unrecognizable now. Except for the few, rare structures that we see today, and have little to no explanation for, other than speculation based on vague 3rd person accounts.
Do we know that knowledge of those accomplishments has been repeatedly erased from history? That seems like a bit of a leap.
We don't. But I find it hard to believe that not one person in 90,000 years of human history, never came up with a single advancement similar to the ones that happen all the time now. Our brains were just as developed as they are now, for that entire time.
It is inconceivable that we only started using them in any significant capacity, just recently.
Well, we did use them, but mostly for not starving to death and not getting eaten. Both of which we did very regularly anyway. Also, there were only a few thousand humans overall.
We didn't have free time until agriculture and automation.
Hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers have pretty similar workloads - by many estimates, subsistence farming requires more labor, even. The advantage in subsistence farming is consistency and food preservation, allowing for larger populations, surplus, and specialization.
If you make a stone spearhead twice a month, you might not spend much time thinking of how to do it better - but if you do it for the whole village, 60 times per month, you might be spending some of that knapping time thinking about how to make it easier.
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@Archangel1313@lemmy.ca Look into Islamic scolars, a lot of scientific discoveries done in Europe after the middle ages were made hundreds of years earlier by them. Then I guess their dark ages started, making a lot of knowledge "lost". On te other hand, you should keep in mind two things, the first is that knowledge is incremental, everything we know is built on previous knowledge. The other is that while humans were around a long time, they were not in the big numbers of today. As a consequence they didn't need farming, they could always travel further to new lands for finding food and shelter.
@LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone
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@LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone ...King Louis XIV had an anal fistula and required a doctor's attention and horrific chair that would frighten anyone, the entire court began using the tortuous device unnecessarily...
@LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone
Just read about Doggerland or the Messinian salinity crysis and then think of climate change.
Most of school going humans are aware of the concept of force and motion.
We have vague ideas of the laws that govern them roughly 400 years after their discovery by Newton.
On the basis of that, one can form a rough estimate that it would take humans another 30-40 years to assimilate quantum mechanics and special relativity.
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