Octopus Overlords

I was about to post this new finding, and specifically the following paragraph, to wonder at the massive amount of time it took our ancestors to move from the most crude hand axe (just a head, no handle), to something even a little more refined (a few different types and sizes of heads for different purposes). Half a MILLION years to make a small technological advance. And think of the pace of those advances today. It boggles the mind.

OTOH, maybe it's amazing that it ONLY took early man that long to advance, considering the evolutionary fog our tiny, early brains were in at that time?

"Nevertheless, these hand axes served the ancient humans well for several hundred thousand years — from 1.2 million years ago to 500,000 years ago — and the technology remained largely unchanged during the time.

But around 320,000 years ago, the ancient humans seem to have switched to an entirely new technology. The scientists found numerous smaller, flatter, sharper stone tools."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... p-in-kenya

Fascinating stuff (to me).

It makes you wonder what drove the progression to better tools after all that stasis. I'd guess that the answer is "competition" (if not conflict), and that proto-human populations were so small and dispersed that there wasn't very much of it. Alternately, their brains might have evolved better planning skills and abstract thought, and their tools followed.

Kraken wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 12:35 pm It makes you wonder what drove the progression to better tools after all that stasis.

Evolution. Jared Diamond theorized that thievery was the main instigator -- Og the Clever survives a drought or harsh winter by stealing food from less astute cave dwellers. The gene for smart passes down to his ancestors, and pretty soon we have a gaggle of those smarter than your average monkeyman. Among these new and improved tool-users, a genius among them finds a way to thwart the other deceiving descendants of Og and the race is on.

Diamond's more elegant explanation is, IIRC, among the early chapters of Guns, Germs and Steel.

The historians on reddit have issues with Diamond's work.

A lot more years pass per turn in those early turns, so even if you try and rush the tech tree to handled tools you’ll still see a ton of years pass by with starter tool tech.

To see a widespread change like that you'd need to have a smart person or group come up with the change, but also the contact and some shared culture with other groups to see it spread. It's entirely possible some groups in that time made modifications and improvements to the basic design, but those could be lost if the group wasn't in contact with other local groups to spread the knowledge.

One theory I remember reading was women marrying into other, nearby villages was at times a powerful way of spreading new ideas through a culture as they could potentially bring with them better ways of doing things.

Many of the pressures (food supply, environment, disease) on early humans probably weren't much alleviated by their tools until the earliest agricultural revolution.

Custom and instinct might also have made early humans very conservative, since adoption of new methods carries risk. Sticking with what works could have been both biologically and culturally ingrained.

That was my thought on reading it. It wasn't that everyone was stupid it was just there were not that many of us. If a guy thought of a better way then it didn't go past him or his people and either died with him or died with the tribe or got changed. Maybe in the tribe the guy's work was better but the rest are like "We've done it this way for half a million years and it works" and ignored him

Daehawk wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 3:40 pm It wasn't that everyone was stupid it was just there were not that many of us.

That is an excellent point. Just the sheer number of humans trying to solve the same problem today probably explains most of that discrepancy.

And for anyone that did not read the article, the point was not how long it took early man to advance with stone age tools, but that they recently discovered tools from the Stone Age much earlier than previously thought existed.

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 3:44 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 3:40 pm It wasn't that everyone was stupid it was just there were not that many of us.

That is an excellent point. Just the sheer number of humans trying to solve the same problem today probably explains most of that discrepancy.

And for anyone that did not read the article, the point was not how long it took early man to advance with stone age tools, but that they recently discovered tools from the Stone Age much earlier than previously thought existed.

...meaning the "conservative era" of technological near-stasis was longer than thought?

It's also likely that the use of more advanced tools rose and fell back many times. Figuring out that those rocks and these new methods made better hand-axes didn't make you master of a continent, and a group that passed down its new knowledge for dozens of generations might still have stayed very local before a disease wiped them all out (and axe v0.02 with them).

This also makes me consider that advances could potentially have been made in isolation, then migration (or later, trade) resulted in a sudden, widespread adoption.

I blame their primitive patent laws.

Kraken wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:05 pm I blame their primitive patent laws.

Okay, that made me laugh. Nice one.

Kraken wrote: ↑Fri Mar 16, 2018 12:35 pm It makes you wonder what drove the progression to better tools after all that stasis. I'd guess that the answer is "competition" (if not conflict), and that proto-human populations were so small and dispersed that there wasn't very much of it. Alternately, their brains might have evolved better planning skills and abstract thought, and their tools followed.

According to Terrance McKenna, it was when ealy man came out of the trees and started eating psychedelic mushrooms, which expanded their consciousness.

After hitting a mastodon with my little hand axe I knew we needed to advance pretty quickly but I didn't want to do it so I left in to Donald.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 19, 2018 4:29 pm After hitting a mastodon with my little hand axe I knew we needed to advance pretty quickly but I didn't want to do it so I left in to Donald.

And it was a female mastodon. And The Donald did "hit it." With his tool.

I think that there are a few factors that combine to determine speed of advancement:
1. Need. Do you need an advancement? If not, then you won't look for one or pay attention to one if it's presented to you.
2. Communication. Let's say I discover an advancement, do I have the tools to communicate that to you? Do we have language that allows that?
3. Time. For me to discover an advancement AND spread the word about it, I need free time. Not only that, I need you to have the free time to give to me so I can show off what I discovered.
4. Enthusiasm. So I discovered something, and have shown it to you and you liked it and started using it. Are you capable of getting others into it too, so that use and knowledge of it continues to spread? Or does your interest in it die with you?

In today's world, with all of us so connected to each other, a lot of those obstacles are removed. So it's no wonder things are advancing faster and faster. Look at how fast things go 'viral' these days. Way back when you couldn't get anything to go viral in your own tribe, much less in the world as a whole.

Sometimes when I play an action rpg like Path of Exile I use the same weapon on my character through multiple level ups. Why wouldn't I if it gets the job done? Sure I do a bit more damage with another weapon, or I can craft something with some extra quality, or I can add a gem to it or whatever. Sometimes I just say 'meh, this works fine' and continue. If I was a stone age person and some primitive axe head shaped rock got the job done, that's what I'd use. It wouldn't even occur to me to try to fancy it up.

“We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”

Particular individuals probably did make advances over that huge span of time. Some of those innovations might have spread within their family unit or tribe, but died out before they could leave enough relics behind for us to find. For a new technique to catch on permanently, one group's technology + culture must have finally become so dominant that others had to adapt or die out.

Still doesn't explain how or why that happened. One story I read argued that climate change drove the need to adapt, and although that feels like projecting the present onto the past, it provided evidence that the climate did indeed shift at the right time.