"[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."
Myths of pre ice age life were spoken of by plato
Humans are story tellers. Stories last a long time. The youngest fossils of Megalania, which grew up to 7 meters (23 feet) in length and weighing over 600 kg (1,300 lbs), which is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have ever lived, date to around 50,000 years ago, confirming that it was alive when the first Aboriginal people arrived in Australia. Early human inhabitants and the giant lizards would have shared the same environment, and Aboriginal oral traditions about giant goannas may be based on these ancient encounters.
Those stories lasted 50k years.
Do you have a suspect for the Bunyip, by the way? I like that one.
It's understandable that ancient hunters might have focused on the larger animals, some of which may also have been less dangerous to hunt, but other smaller animals like deer, bison/cattle, pigs, horses were also common at the time, and even today hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems common among primitive tribes, and agriculture/farming (e.g. Maasai - cattle) less so.
There are other theories for the neolithic revolution and switch from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyle, including things like population density (partly by cultural choice), and post-ice age climate change enabling farming.
There used to be elephants and mammoths all over the world, but almost all places where humans developed agriculture they had already killed all of them.
Modern guns changed that of course.
One way to stop them is to eat them :)
So when farming requires you to have a big hunting party constantly ready to take down an elephant, why not just live off elephant meat? The farm doesn't add any value and is very difficult to start.
There was no need for complex societies anywhere ever. You can find primitive peoples in pretty much any environment on earth (hot, cold, wet, dry, etc). I think it’s much more likely there were complex societies we never heard of that have vanished over the centuries. 200,000 years is a long time (and that date only goes further back as our understanding increases). How long would it take for remnants of our civilization disappear if an apocalyptic meteor hit?
A complex society or a natural disaster (a la dinosaurs) wiping out megafauna sounds much more plausible than the equivalent of the primitive societies we see today.
The problem with your argument is best illustrated with that famous picture of airplane with bullet holes; the only primitive societies you see today are those that are more or less sustainable; any unsustainable primitive society would have gone into a conflict with a major industrial power and ended up being wiped out. That of course does not prove that unsustainable primitive societies never existed; in fact I would say they were the norm as humans were expanding (when the frontier is constantly expanding, there is no need to sustain anything!).
Eons, the nuclear testing in the twentieth century left traces identifiable worldwide as I understand it, hence pre war steel and all that.
We can confidently say we're the first nuclear civilization on this planet at least
there is no need for life at all
life exists because it replicates and multiplies while testing variations.
apparently complex society variants do a great job of that.
I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work' to 'sedentary lifestyle'. The latter only happened in the post war years when we worked out how to have all of the energy we need on tap. Before then, life was hard, albeit not for everyone since we have hierarchies.
There is research pointing to hunter gathers only needed to do a couple of hours of work daily, while neolithic people engaged in agriculture had to work much longer hours for the same kcal output.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This compares to a floor of 50-70 hours per week for premodern agriculture. The other side of it is that many of our estimates for agriculture come from hierarchical societies where a significant fraction of the work performed every year was heavily taxed. It’s hard to disentangle how much work was performed for sustenance of one’s family or village compared to the greater societies development (noble extravagance and all).
> I also don't entirely follow your point that goes from 'backbreaking work' to 'sedentary lifestyle'. The latter only happened in the post war years when we worked out how to have all of the energy we need on tap
By sedentary lifestyle I don't mean individual sedentarism, like being a couch potato. I mean society-wide, in the sense of not living in permanent settlements were people spend their lives mostly in the same plot of land, but are constantly on the move.
https://arheologia.com.ua/index.php/arheologia/article/view/...
Now if they can only all pull together as a team, it's double Whoppers for everybody. After they come out the winner :)
I'm reminded of the "Alone" TV series where one contestant shot an 800lb Ox with a bow and arrow and single-handedly butchered it and carried it back 2 miles to his camp (requiring about a dozen trips).
Essentially, it claims that modern humans and our ancestors starting with Homo habilis were primarily carnivores for 2 million years. We moved back to an omnivorous diet starting around 85,000 years ago after killing off the megafauna, is the hypothesis.
Agriculture, at first, simply made life easier. You didn't have to be nomadic always looking for more food, you could just stay in one place. Your food was right there. It was awesome.
The problem was, it was so insanely successful -- you were having so many more children because of all the food -- populations shot up and suddenly there wasn't enough food anymore when you had a bad year.
So it's actually the opposite of what you're describing -- from what I understand, famine wasn't really a thing until agriculture caused populations to increase massively.
What, do downvotes mean no? I thought this fitted nicely.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11895740/
I wrote about its impacts on society here:
https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747
My argument (which I need to update) is that it was the primary catalyst for society to create the system of private property at scale.
However the roots of ritual society are more likely to be centered around the first sex strike around 70,000 BC, first proposed by Chris Knight in his 1991 book “Blood Relations”
http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/menstruation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_strike
The megafauna crash around 50,000BC then catalyzed the expansion of what was then a novel concept, of ritualized transaction, around more sedentary practices eventually leading to agriculture around 13000BC
TIL we're all megafauna. We should make this a rite of passage, when a kid hits 97 lb they get a megafauna party.
I understand what they're trying to do here, but is this the best selection criteria? You can basically tear down/debone small animal carcasses with your hands, so there's less likely to be cut and percussion marks.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx2615
Hunting rather than scavenging seems to be just an assumption, not investigated. But that's reasonable, they'd surely hunt a delicious giant sloth, why not.
And nobody really knows how many humans were alive e.g. 10,000 years ago, other than - probably not many. There were almost certainly less than a million humans in the entirety of South America. The max population density there would have been 1 human per 18 square km. But of course in practice we would have huddled around water sources and in small settlements, greatly reducing our overall spread. So you could probably have traveled hundreds of kms in all directions before seeing a single human. That's just not a lot of people to completely eliminate a bunch of massive species throughout an entire continent.
By contrast these species all started disappearing just about the time when we were leaving an ice age. And these animals may have been overadapted not only to the cold, but the associated vegetation/prey and feeding patterns.