I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.
Am I reading that correctly?
Link to the paper mentioned in the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09630-7
While it's not a given that fire is a hard prerequisite for an industrial civilization, it certainly accelerated our technological development. Fact of the matter is, we know of exactly one civilization, which is not enough to draw any conclusions. There's no real reason we know of that aquatic species cannot evolve into a technological civilization, we just haven't seen it happen. Fact is we don't really know how an intelligent technological species evolves. We only have guesses from our own history.
Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.
(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)
Personally I disagree with 'impossible', but it would definitely be harder. There's a pretty good argument to be made for leaving significant quantities of fossil fuels in the ground for the next civilization. If we wipe ourselves out, whoever comes next is going to very badly need those fuels to rebuild an industrial base.
Romans had industrial processes, too, for things like fabric / laundry cleaning.
What's new in the 18th/19th century is full-on mechanization of industry. And the wage labour system to make it possible. Accompanied by acts of enclosure etc to drive the peasantry off the land and into factories. Also the mechanization of agriculture that went with that.
What’s missing that make them more akin to orcas or wolves?
So who knows. Maybe if you gave them an extra 10k years, they would have achived "civilization". It is not much for the scale of human existance. But it is longer than any of our civilizations has existed for.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
I still think there would be huge barriers to "civilization" as I think you mean? (Do any of the apes have "civilization"?).
I mean there might be a already a civilization that is in the building that will peak 100k years later, and we just don't know about it.
Beyond that…
Being able to have down time seems like a prerequisite to creating. civilization.
Also, having both the intelligence and desire to seem and recognize ways to improve—even if not strictly necessary—via tools to free up even more time also seems to be a requirement.
And having a system to reliably and in-scale transmit this knowledge is the final ingredient.
So some baseline stability, down-time, intelligence, reliable knowledge transmission, tool-use for the above, and active willingness to improve all of the above all seem like necessary ingredients.
"Where Did Earth Get Its Deserts? Maybe It's Ai, Datacentres and Climate Change"