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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> why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement
Well, we are apes, so clearly apes did have advancement.
But our key evolutionary advantage is intelligence, more so than any other animal, which is why humans invented agriculture. Increasing the food supply allowed our species to thrive.
Because warfare. Creating wars was simply easier for humanity all along. If we’re short on food (or whatever) just kill them and take it.
When warfare started to not solve problems then maybe we need to band together instead and figure it out.
A main theory is that humans only experienced a certain cognitive evolution in the past 100k years or so, which allowed homo sapiens to organize and plan and eventually create agriculture-fueled settlements that eventually led to civilizations.
I’ll put down a different spin than the other replies.
When we dig up the remains of people long lost, a massive percentage of them died at the hands of other humans. I have read articles claiming 30%. Our ancestors came from a violent world.
In a fertile area, there would be a large number of roaming hunter gatherer packs. If you wanted to set up a farm and some trading posts to begin a settlement, you have to do the work and you have to *defend* it. Its certainly easy to take than it is to make.
I wonder if it just took a long time for there to be a critical mass of people willing to sit down, build up a settlement and potentially sacrifice themselves for the common good. A small pack of humans would stand little chance by themselves trying to set up a community with valuable stored resources such as food.
Our ability for language seperates us from apes.
If we have evolved to a point where other species are no longer competition, the own species become competition, but since the strength of the species is based on social structures there a duality. You compete and work together at the same time.
That duality combined with language created a competitive process that caters intelligence. It’s also our achilles heel, since it’s hard to get to a consensus when your nature is about competing.
It seems like a cosmic joke but it isn’t. My guess is that most intelligent life either dies with the star that created them, or they destroy themselves.
There is a solution, but then we need to change to core of our being while keeping the intelligence.
Either way it’s the reason why it takes so long to get things done.
The book, Sapiens, (I know its received deserved criticism) has an interesting view that it took some specialized communication to form social structures of more than around 50. Specifically, gossip, in the sense of communicating about members of the group who are not present. Animals without this almost never form social groups more than 50,but humans were able to quickly once the proper communication developed.
Not saying it’s the only reason, or even the most important, but I find it interesting to consider gossip in this way.
Food. Locusts will tear a crop to the ground and move on.
As omnivores, we have a wider range of food resources, but until we started agriculture (and selectively modifying crops to our tastes and needs) we simply had to move on to find more.
This is kind of a mystery. Humans (meaning people we could mate with and produce viable offspring) have been around for an estimated 150,000 years. But apparently it only takes around 6000 years to go from a basic agrarian society to sending robots to Mars.
So there has been time for humans to have developed into advanced societies and fallen many times over, but we see no evidence of that in the fossil record.
In order to transition from agrarian to industrial you need food, fossil fuels, and steel. You can’t really make a useful steam engine without steel. If your society doesn’t have those things then you either trade for them or you remain agrarian.
One thing we know, is that as society’s become more advanced it requires more cooperation. Your phone is made from minerals mined in several different countries, the chips were made in tiawan on machines made in the Netherlands, the whole thing was assembled in China and it was designed in the United States. So it’s very hard to have advanced technology without free international trade. International trade is very slow and inefficient with wooden sailboats.
I’m not an expert, but this is how I see it: Our ability to create civilization primarily relied on our capacity to pass down knowledge to future generations, beyond just through our genes and instincts. It is likely that we ourselves hindered this process as nomadic tribes came into contact, fought, and lost. Essentially, this reset our ability to pass down knowledge to zero repeatedly (this likely went on for a long time) until a tribe became strong enough to establish a stable foundation and adequately defend itself, ensuring the preservation of knowledge for more than just one or two generations. This likely compelled other tribes to do the same, as the territories of the stronger tribes expanded. They needed to replicate this process or face extinction. This is why you see agriculture emerging independently all over the world. If you are referring to a civilization as complex as ours, it simply comes down to the discovery of a fuel source, such as fossil fuels. Otherwise, we would still be relatively primitive. However, it took a long time for these significant fuel sources to be utilized effectively.
It took 200,000+ years to develop farming, even as anatomically modern homo sapiens, big brain and all.
The key to everything we have done is ***Collective Learning***: passing on information verbally at first, then as pictures and symbols, then as writing, and now as digital code. This is how we literally transcend death and learn more than any one person could in a lifetime.
Like all such complex systems, laying the foundation takes a long time, then it accelerates exponentially.
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