I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?
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Homo Sapiens Sapiens have been around for 300,000 years not millions of years. Modern humans have been around for 80,000 years, maybe as little as 40,000 years. There may have been some development in how the brain functioned that doesn’t really get picked up in the fossil remains at some point between those dates. The explosion of culture art and technology dates from around about then. 40,000 years ago -11,500 years ago was marked by ice age and interglacial climates with large shifts and vast amounts of land covered by the sea and then re-emerging.
For people with primitive technology and no scientific understanding the domestication of plants and livestock is going to take time which an unstable environment and nomadic lifestyle doesn’t grant. The earliest centre of farming was the middle east which had sedentary villages at least 20,000 years ago, supplementing their hunter-gatherer lifestyle by growing a range of crops on a small scale in gardens. They didn’t switch to farming until 8,000 years later. By this point the crops they have grown in gardens for 1000s of years are domesticated. But critically they probably didn’t have much choice.
Early farmers were malnourished, unhealthy and worn out compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors and their hunter gatherer contemporaries. It’s very likely that the switch to farming came because wild resources were over exploited and could no longer support the population. Farming culture developed spontaneously in a few unconnected places and then spread rapidly. This happened over a few thousand years everywhere from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Amazon. Before this occured humanity had spread into every easily reached part of the world and in most cases had caused the extinction, at least locally, of their favourite prey and scarcity of the other animals they hunted.
Once we started farming we had dense, fixed, connected populations that could develop and disseminate improvements in technology quickly. Those improvements led to more people, with more time to think of new things, a wider scope of viewpoints, and more connections to spread those ideas and learn from each other. Eventually we develop things that massively increase our ability to advance technology like writing, the scientific method, and computing, and here we are.
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