The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions. Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
I was really interested in seeing what's the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime!
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
Interesting, I've never thought about it in terms of % of years lived and when. I recently saw that 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Wild. And I agree that it really does show the dominance of recent history.
Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).
Where do you get that average life expectancy of 10-12? I never heard a figure that low, and I doubt humanity would have lasted that long if the average life expectancy was barely enough to reach sexual maturity. Also, I think these life expectancy in the past stats mostly do not distinguish between the extremely high death rate for infants, and the more normal life expectancy for those that survived past 2 y.o. The distribution is so skewed, I guess even the median expectancy would not be really useful.
Agriculture actually gives ample time to do something else, even with labor-intensive crops like rice versus wheat. Ancient people probably worked fewer hours that we do nowadays.
It always seems that we discover artifacts that push history farther back. Göbekli Tepe is 12,000 years old and I doubt hunter gatherers made this. I think sophisticated societies existed well past what we have discovered, but time has made it exponentially difficult to get historical proof except in bits and pieces.
> Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted.
Not really, agriculture took thousands of years to breed productive crops, that were worth cultivating. Wild ancestors of modern crops where hardly worth growing, if at all. Like there were many parts of the world where they literally weren't.
Once the crops became more productive, transitioning to to agriculture made a lot more sence.
Graeber and Wengrow contest that take severely with their survey of modern anthro and archaeological research, I recommend their papers or Dawn of Everything
Yes highly recommended. For those not familiar, Dawn of Everything essentially starts with the assumption that people have always been curious, intelligent, flexible creatures, and that smaller core populations let a ton of different societal organizations be tested and tried over the years. They also take aim at the "farming is inevitable and the root of inequality" trope that's prevalent. Since, as they show, a ton of really large societies over the years chose not to become primarily agricultural.
The knowledge a person can acquire and bring to next generation is key here. The more organized, free and widespread this knowledge is, the higher the probability it will survive.
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
Without wisdom, all is for naught. Consider internal combustion engines. Within the ICE is a long range agglomeration of knowledge and techniques ultimately allowing it to be produced in inconceivable quantities. It has also been incredibly harmful in more ways than one, the most salient and widely agreed upon being climate change.
And of course such inventions of knowledge don't act alone, and they independently have large effects, but are also affected by other factors, for instance empirical medicine has had a tremendous effect on population size, and that has in turn spurred more demand for more ICEs which has fed into the gross consumption of fuel products, and in addition obviously the production of byproducts like greenhouse gases. It also prompted what I would classify as a pretty significant terraforming project in the development of infrastructure. It also remodeled society.
Without hazarding inductive error in an ineradicably complex system which exists in in "infinite" timeline both in the context of the fractaline nature (e.g. shoreline paradox) and the sheer quantity of nonparallel time, this is important when considering the probability of black swan events. As an instance of this Benoit Mandelbrot reviewed the Black Monday data, finding that the vast majority of movement in the market occured in a window of about 10 seconds (if memory serves) And Black Monday itself was a small fraction of a year, of a decade, but nonetheless has an outsized effect.
I think the most obvious explanation, one that doesn't even require much imagination because it just coincides with the very concept of history and pre-history, is that people lost a lot of stuff when only oral tradition was kept and the threshold of complexity that could be reproduced reliably over generations was rather small and also asymmetric: stuff that could be kept inside of tales of general interest could be carried much further in space and time than things that would be specific or narrow in audience.
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
> So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal
And then even more rapidly with the printing press and regular, reliable mail services.
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
Historically, it has always only taken 'a village' to raise a civilization. Is a million (~1 in a thousand) inquisitive minds (globally) too generous or too low a figure? There has to be at least 100k serious minds and they are networked. That's a lot of brain power. And the trash consumers are definitely serving a purpose. They are both social ballast (providing the necessary inertia for stability of norms) and economic precursors (by fueling the low value economic activities that support high value 0.1% projects and aims). Those n billion eyeballs are the reason the 100K can teleconference in realtime and soon have AI assistants chipping in.
Unless I misread things, the article is about a hypothesis, that before the current era, many tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans were in a stable population state ("pre-Malthusian"), and so most humans were mostly free of substantial food pressure.
My own conjecture, is that the material/scientific/intellectual process that seems to have started around the time of agriculture, and which has been accelerating ever since until we're all sucked into this global mechanical survival process, is driven mostly by the number of people able to sit around and think about surviving in this runaway process (i.e. they face Malthusian pressure, they want and need more), and also their ease of communicating with each other. People pondering how to feed themselves more in large forums come up with ways to transform the world physically through their collective labour. Such a runaway process would not likely occur in a small stable population without the pressure to do so in the first place.
I don't think it's about people being able to communicate with each other and enjoy leisure, but people developing the tools to handle larger and larger communities.
One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint
Hammurabi is still one of the most popular characters in history because of his code that planted the seed of the embryo of "presumption of innocence", a huge revolution for humanity. He was also very good and efficient at tax collection, so he could finance huge irrigation projects that made it possible to give cultivable fields to the poorer segment of the population, partially solving land abandonment.
In a sentence. he was good at politics.
So as fire and the wheel are symbols of the birth of the modern man, politics is the tool that bootstrapped modern societies.
>> able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests
>> The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.
This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.
Literacy in itself does not "make a horse run any faster".
But ancient literacy is correlated with more developed and bigger states (empires) whose ordinary inhabitants aren't constantly threatened with wars and enjoy certain protections of the law. Such countries also build roads and engage in extensive internal and external trade. In such a stable environment, culture is easier to cultivate. And horses on well-built roads do travel faster.
Literacy surely makes accurate and trustworthy communication much faster. Not many humans can accurately recall the amount of detailed information that can be included on a couple of sheets of paper, and even if they could, unless the messenger is known to the recipient, there's an issue of trust (written/sealed communications are generally much harder to forge).
I suspect literacy is a necessary but not sufficient enabling technology for more rapid social and technological change. China has had pervasive literacy longer than anywhere else yet stagnated culturally and technologically due to its political conditions. Conversely the development of moveable type printing in Europe, which can only have a real effect with widespread literacy, lead to an explosion of social and technological change.
You do know that child game where you are told a story, and you have to pass it on to the next, who will have to tell it based on only your story, etc. It doesn’t need much to make absolutely no sense.
It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.
Depending on your POV, is it sad that societies and cultures are becoming more homogeneous? Isn't there less diversity as time goes by in the modern world. The speed of development is good but is it at a cost to diversity?
You have it spot on, but I think you are out by orders of magnitude, possibly a million hours back then, maybe more. This is the essence of why things are moving so quickly now.
Not sure, those elites were more literate and educated than even the 1% of today could hope. Collective wankery produces a lot of noise, and more difficult than ever to cut through it
It’s also a bit self serving. Essentially we’re saying, “Yeah it looks as though I’m just doodling around on my phone while I work in online ads, but really, my life is 1000x more valuable to the future of humanity than that of some random Neanderthal, serf or even Caesar. (Oh, and btw, I don’t even have kids.)”
I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
This is an important point that is easy to overlook in our age of historically cheap information storage and transfer.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
Almost everything has probably been invented and forgotten multiple times before it finally established itself as a widely known thing that could be reliably passed on without going extinct. Memes, not just funny pictures.
For the vast majority of the palaeolithic people were severely underdeveloped compared to even hunter gatherer cultures today. They didn’t have teepees or yurts, or anything much above basic stone tools.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether this occured suddenly 40,000 years ago or gradually starting more than 80,000 years ago. I will definitely be paying attention to this debate going forward.
I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.
The Tazmanians are a perfect example of this. They were separated from mainland Australia around 10,000 years ago by rising sea level. In that time they regressed technologically to the point where they had only 24 distinct tools compared with the several hundred available to the mainlanders.
I wonder how much traditionalism played a role? Would a person suggesting a teepee instead of a cave or sleeping in the open be murdered for sacrilege?
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I imagine you and the GP are imposing an way too modern view into those people.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
> Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
The same way we would treat someone today who wants to build an engine powered by magnets, gravity or fueled by water. Someone who wants to map personality traits onto the position of the celestial bodies. Someone who wants to build a device to talk with people in the after life. Someone who wants to use remote viewing or channeling to discover useful things. etc etc
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
Cultural inertia: same reason society moves slowly today even when a small group of people are convinced they have a much better way. When change requires the whole group, the change has to be clearly advantageous (high reward, low risk, or both). That's because there is a material and information overhead to change, with bigger changes being more costly.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.
And most importantly: who controlled that new invention.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
Organic structures tend to not last thousands of years very well. We simply don't know much besides that they were as intelligent and creative as us. Probably had less intellectual shackles about they could organize and run their societies.
I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
> Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally.
The amount of industrial engineering required to make a ballpoint pen is quite substantial the click mechanism isn’t the impressive part making balls which are dimensionally accurate to 0.1 micrometer is the challenging part.
Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism.
And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
And all that engineering happened after someone realized that such a thing would be useful. That classic HN comment about how Dropbox wasn't useful because rsync exists - that's more or less the standard response to innovation. "The thing you've created reduces pain points I'm so used to that I no longer see them". Certain inventions only get made because of really determined, persnickety individuals who will not accept the pain point.
It would be fairly easy to come up with calculus reasoning about mathematics in the way we do today, because the tools we're using to do maths is highly conducive to calculus in particular.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots.
If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).
The Darwin vs Wallace example is completely different from the Newton vs Leibniz.
In both cases, neither stole ideas from the other. However, at least my understanding, is that Newton and Leibniz did the work at the same time, but because Newton already had a reputation, Newton took all the credit. In the case of Darwin vs Wallace instead, Darwin had years and years of research, notes, and writings done but unpublished, but he rushed to publish when he heard that Wallace had similar ideas. So in a sense, Darwin didn't walk away with more credit than he deserved, as he was there first anyway. Newton vs Leibniz doesn't look as clear cut.
(By the way, in before Edison vs Tesla, that's yet another entirely different situation of plain exploiting and stealing of Tesla by Edison)
Yes, I thought using Calculus as an example actually eroded the point they were trying to make since it was independently developed by Leibniz and Newton.
Not to cast any shade on either of those two brilliant people, but it does suggest Calculus was "ready" for 17th-century mathematicians (or, you know, the other way around).
Neither did Euclid and his stuff survived. There are early not-quite-calculus ideas in Aristotle, which lends even more weight to thinking that they didn't get all the way there- if they had, and the Aristotelian stuff survived, why didn't the fully-worked-out stuff survive?
Another problem is people assume prevailing discovery narratives are truthful. It's harder to do that in the sciences because of the breadcrumbs left behind.
>it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
Newton wasn't first, Calculus was known in India almost 1000 years earlier and it wouldn't be surprising if Newton was a student of work gathered from parts of the world that were illegal to credit with such discoveries at the time.
I think you have your dates confused, as the Kerala school was only a few hundred years before Newton, and pretending that what was discovered in India is the same as what Newton discovered is misleading. If we're crediting whoever first made theorems about infinite sums or derivatives to be the inventor of calculus, then calculus also predates Newton in Europe.
A lot of people contributed theorems over the centuries that would now be considered part of calculus. Developing a mathematical framework like calculus is more of a gradual and continuous building of knowledge than a single event. There's a reason Leibniz and Newton happened to independently create calculus at the same time.
I can confirm. Regarding SPA in early days (before XMLHttpRequest): no one is doing that way, we can't find another developer thinking like that to help you, are you sure?.. (and browsers bugs)
Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check.
This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism.
This is also incorrect:
> The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females.
Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
> Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check.
Aside from the fact this is incorrect, it's also rooted in a false assumption. It's a common mistake to believe the ecosystem is in some sort of steady state or equilibrium. It is not and never has been. The climate changes. The geology changes. Invasive species arrive. Someone wins an evolutionary arms race and wipes out the rest. Populations go through booms and busts - or even extinctions - because they consume resources too rapidly. There is no variable that is not in continual flux. Things only appear to be "steady state" on very short timescales, but attentive people have always noticed this - the ancient Greeks were aware of massive geographic changes, for example.
When too many variables change too fast or too far, we see mass extinctions (really just an increase in the extinction rate) as different species don't make it through the selection pressure. Are we causing one now? Sure, absolutely. But not because we're special. Because we're not. We like to believe we are wise, rational technocratic masters of nature. We are not. We are causing climate change and extinctions like every other species that begins to dominate (dominate may not even be the right word - some species that don't dominate produce massive 'destructive' changes.) Probably the earliest known example is the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. No amount of trying to be more 'rational' and 'sustainable' will produce an ecological equilibrium over anything but the very short term.
> Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before
No, but Mother Nature has ample evidence of doing so. If we want to continue as a species we need a way to persist after the next apocalyptic natural disaster. We’re fortunate some ancient peoples lived in environments that forced them to build societies and progress technology - otherwise we might not know we’re one meteor away from extinction!
> male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
They band together to fight the male who has the pride so they can get the females.
The difference between humans and other mammals in these fights is that we are much more efficient at killing and that females are fertile all year round.
And if your definition of default must expand in order to include homosexuality then you really need to examine the benefit of saying that it is a "default."
Since you brought up the Mosuo, it’s entirely possible that the harmonious feudal depiction of their society is exaggerated for reasons of national politics; to the same extant Chagnon was accused of exaggerating the Yanomamö.
The Mosuo are _matrilineal_ (figure out which kinship group you're in based on Mom's line) but not _matriarchal_ (women hold most of the political power).
You'll occasionally see it argued that the Mosuo are matriarchal, but what's going on is many people are desperate to try to find an example of matriarchy, and the Mosuo are as close as it gets. So yeah, if you squint, stand on one leg, and crook your head a bit it sort of looks like they might be.
What's really the case is that every single human society we know of has been some flavor of patriarchal.
> This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö.
The article feels very much like a thesis in search of support, which might explain the laser like focus on one particular data point that appeared to support the author's premise. It also explains why criticism of the original research is dismissed as "cancel culture" rather than taken as a sign to at least look for other supporting data.
The motivation makes more sense if you look at the rest of that substack (I wasn't familiar with it, so I poked around a bit). The author evidently has a deep interest in sex and gender role topics viewed through a particular lens. The second post I looked at was basically incel ideology 101, complete with Becky, Chad, and links to Jordan Peterson. I'll save you a click, but apparently teenage girls are depressed because they're not having sex with incel teenage boys.
Given the rest of that blog, it's probably not surprising the author managed to boil down a topic as complex as the development of societies into a simple explanation about sex, backed by a single data point that's out of favor with actual professionals in the field.
I agree. I only skimmed their other work but was curious if anybody here thought so.
It's not a direct analog, but the pacing, attitude and tactics suggest they have a worn and dogeared copy of Allan Bloom's treatise Closing of the American Mind on their desk. Though well written and speckled with reasonable arguments, Bloom plainly argued that 'civilized' 'reasonable' white protestant moral and cultural values are correct, and everyone will be better off once they adopt them. Anecdotally, the vast MRA diaspora also coats toxic ideological bullshit in truth nuggets to muddy the lines between them.
The focus on the Yamomamö appears to be simply to ground the article in something concrete, making it more interesting. He does claim that this once heretical view is now widely accepted in anthropology and it's a description of many tribes, not just one.
And your take on it is so utterly bizarre I can't believe you actually read it. He literally talks about how strange it is that the "Becky" concept exists as it never did when he was a teen (it seems equally weird to me).
Pretty sure his version of developed only happened recently is because the climate has been really stable for the last 10k or so years meaning we can actually have agriculture based societies not get screwed when their climate suddenly changes
The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game.
The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible.
This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources.
>> The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food.
That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
>The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
Notably the causality runs in both directions here - the fighting over women is what prevents the population from falling into a Malthusian trap.
The next time someone tells you that pre-agricultural populations only spent 10 hours a week on work and the rest on leisure or whatever, you should reply asking what percentage of those populations died do to homicide. The answer might be revealing.
> The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far.
Did you miss the fact that the same pattern was observed in multiple societies, by multiple researchers, in places as far as Australia and Papua New Ghinea?
Really good article, and yet another newsletter/blog I feel compelled to subscribe to yet probably never read (sigh).
> What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc.
All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
It's not a very good article - it's just a lot of projection based on a single example.
Human societies did develop significantly over that time frame - e.g. the discovery that plants could be cultivated and bred to improve their desirable quantities was one breakthrough that happened >10K years ago, the steady development of more complex language and ultimately the recording of language in written form - it's just that there might not be much of a historical record of these developments. Almost the only thing that's been preserved are the stone tools, which also show a steady improvement over time.
What exactly did you find good about the article? Sounds like the author just over extended observations from one tribe to all of human history. Maybe it’s true but it sure as hell ain’t substantiated. So we invented tools discovered fire and then just went back to dragging women by their hair to caves for 500K years? Or maybe there’s more nuance in it.
As time went by, evidence for Chagnon's claims became too overwhelming to ignore for most anthropologists. Numerous other anthropologists came to the same conclusions as Chagnon, both before and after his work. From Australia to Papua New Guinea to South America, the same phenomenon has been observed: Men kill each other at high rates in conflicts that center around the distribution of women.
Indeed, I was talking just the other day with someone who mentioned that machines will never do X like humans. I simply had to say that never is a long time. If you are a physicalist who believes that the physical state of the brain determines consciousness and thought, then there really is nothing special about humans that we couldn't replicate given enough technological skill.
The basis of human rights is largely that we fought for them. That's why they seem arbitrary. And why animals lack them entirely in the strictest sense.
Similarly democracy is just an analogy for battle. The bigger group wins, ideally with less blood shed.
No one should be under the illusion that democracy does anything other than try to minimize disquiet (it doesn't select the best by any other metric leadership necessarily). It does not even matter how informed the population is.
Back to the point. Why do we have human rights? Basically they are the things that were either fought for directly or got in at the same time.
They are now expanding but I don't think many realise why they were started and the expansion might reverse what won't is the things people are willing to pick up arms over
It's also interesting to look at the theories of human morals like Kohlberg's model. Very few humans reason with the post conventual moral stages.
In 1987, Alcida Ramos--an anthropologist who had worked with the Yanomami--published a terrific article going over what she recognized about them in other texts, including Chagnon's, but more importantly pointing out the degree to which each ethnographer's selective emphasis yields a very different overall picture. Although not too surprising, it's a useful summary for anyone who only knows the Yanomami from one point of view, and it offers a sense of what an anthropologist sees in other work about a group they've worked with themselves--rare insight. Her article is called "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic," and for the moment, it's online at http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/...
Interesting that this post came out only 12 hours after this similar question on reddit was asked (but I suppose coincidences are bound to happen)[0].
The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life.
Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures.
Readit News
In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
[0] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a... [1] https://gist.github.com/mmoskal/58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7...
Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).
Age of death is bimodal, so its most like most people die as infants or live decent lives.
> most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.
I don't think that's actually true - subsistence farming has a lot of down time.
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I don’t think it can be qualified of fast.
Their was back and forth and things did not change rapidly for the better automagically.
For milenaries, hunter gathered were better fed than village dweller ( from bones structures and trash analysis)
Source : Grabber & scott. Mostly “against the grain” and “debt, a history”
When the question is why human society changed so little in 300,000 years, 5000 years is fast.
Not really, agriculture took thousands of years to breed productive crops, that were worth cultivating. Wild ancestors of modern crops where hardly worth growing, if at all. Like there were many parts of the world where they literally weren't.
Once the crops became more productive, transitioning to to agriculture made a lot more sence.
Knowledge has been an is still treated as secret and exclusive. If the 2-3 people with this knowledge dies, we have to rediscover it.
This is the bottleneck human kind faces time and time again
Without wisdom, all is for naught. Consider internal combustion engines. Within the ICE is a long range agglomeration of knowledge and techniques ultimately allowing it to be produced in inconceivable quantities. It has also been incredibly harmful in more ways than one, the most salient and widely agreed upon being climate change.
And of course such inventions of knowledge don't act alone, and they independently have large effects, but are also affected by other factors, for instance empirical medicine has had a tremendous effect on population size, and that has in turn spurred more demand for more ICEs which has fed into the gross consumption of fuel products, and in addition obviously the production of byproducts like greenhouse gases. It also prompted what I would classify as a pretty significant terraforming project in the development of infrastructure. It also remodeled society.
Without hazarding inductive error in an ineradicably complex system which exists in in "infinite" timeline both in the context of the fractaline nature (e.g. shoreline paradox) and the sheer quantity of nonparallel time, this is important when considering the probability of black swan events. As an instance of this Benoit Mandelbrot reviewed the Black Monday data, finding that the vast majority of movement in the market occured in a window of about 10 seconds (if memory serves) And Black Monday itself was a small fraction of a year, of a decade, but nonetheless has an outsized effect.
Even with written records and history, there were a few events of major destruction of records, as they carried a legacy of power structures, just as they do know.
Within living memory we had to go to privileged structures like the University to feasibly attain specialised knowledge beyond amateurish levels, across the disciplines. Just a little further back, reading and having many sources of information was for the rich in most of the world.
The beauty of it is that most of the trail of the current flow of knowledge and technological advance is very well documented, it happened very recently. What's more, it's well documented how it didn't happen previously for a much, much longer period. Before global trade, people had very little spare time to think of anything outside of their day-to-day, and at most of their local governance and the preservation of their livelihood.
Recorded knowledge, free(r) global(er) trade, communications super-charging each other and undergoing major breakthroughs during the Bronze Age and then the printing press and the industrial revolution, and then the hyperconnected world shortly after.
Can you imagine just how little would subsist if humans couldn't record stuff and communicate beyond locally for just a few generations, and we were too busy just surviving short-ish lives by foraging and hunting?
reminds me of universal paperclip in a weird way. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
It's a really good point to bring up in a discussion like this and with agriculture comes and information network along with it (price discovery, crop marketing, weather events, etc etc).
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Also, you have my vote for establishing “hour of collective mental wankery” as a measurement unit.
Some are engaged but how many are just mindlessly scrolling addictive algorithmically curated trash?
My own conjecture, is that the material/scientific/intellectual process that seems to have started around the time of agriculture, and which has been accelerating ever since until we're all sucked into this global mechanical survival process, is driven mostly by the number of people able to sit around and think about surviving in this runaway process (i.e. they face Malthusian pressure, they want and need more), and also their ease of communicating with each other. People pondering how to feed themselves more in large forums come up with ways to transform the world physically through their collective labour. Such a runaway process would not likely occur in a small stable population without the pressure to do so in the first place.
One of the oldest written documents we have is a customer complaint
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
Hammurabi is still one of the most popular characters in history because of his code that planted the seed of the embryo of "presumption of innocence", a huge revolution for humanity. He was also very good and efficient at tax collection, so he could finance huge irrigation projects that made it possible to give cultivable fields to the poorer segment of the population, partially solving land abandonment.
In a sentence. he was good at politics.
So as fire and the wheel are symbols of the birth of the modern man, politics is the tool that bootstrapped modern societies.
This does not require literacy. Culture and society evolve quite easily through word of mouth alone. Traveling people, be them official word-spreaders or not, moved from one place to another very quickly. Songs spread quickly from tavern to tavern. News and culture always moved as fast a horse/runner/ship could carry it. Literacy cannot make a horse run any faster. Literacy only made communication faster once the message could move faster than a physical object. Only with long-distance communication such as semaphore and eventually electronic means. Literacy meant that culture became written down, often literally carved in stone. This codification most likely slowed its previous rapid evolution.
But ancient literacy is correlated with more developed and bigger states (empires) whose ordinary inhabitants aren't constantly threatened with wars and enjoy certain protections of the law. Such countries also build roads and engage in extensive internal and external trade. In such a stable environment, culture is easier to cultivate. And horses on well-built roads do travel faster.
It is good for trivial messages (this is dangerous, etc), but not for anything more complex.
Songs did not spread as far nor as easily as they do it now.
Singularity-Kurzweil claims ongoing "increasing returns", but some papers showed population explains.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".
My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally.
Answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s
Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism.
And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots.
If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).
Unless you're Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Or Darwin and Wallace.
Which suggests these ideas might be a product of their zeitgeist with a number of contempories bording on being the first to publish.
In both cases, neither stole ideas from the other. However, at least my understanding, is that Newton and Leibniz did the work at the same time, but because Newton already had a reputation, Newton took all the credit. In the case of Darwin vs Wallace instead, Darwin had years and years of research, notes, and writings done but unpublished, but he rushed to publish when he heard that Wallace had similar ideas. So in a sense, Darwin didn't walk away with more credit than he deserved, as he was there first anyway. Newton vs Leibniz doesn't look as clear cut.
(By the way, in before Edison vs Tesla, that's yet another entirely different situation of plain exploiting and stealing of Tesla by Edison)
Not to cast any shade on either of those two brilliant people, but it does suggest Calculus was "ready" for 17th-century mathematicians (or, you know, the other way around).
Another problem is people assume prevailing discovery narratives are truthful. It's harder to do that in the sciences because of the breadcrumbs left behind.
>it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
Newton wasn't first, Calculus was known in India almost 1000 years earlier and it wouldn't be surprising if Newton was a student of work gathered from parts of the world that were illegal to credit with such discoveries at the time.
A lot of people contributed theorems over the centuries that would now be considered part of calculus. Developing a mathematical framework like calculus is more of a gradual and continuous building of knowledge than a single event. There's a reason Leibniz and Newton happened to independently create calculus at the same time.
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I think provable academics for academics sake is far more recent than Newton.
can confirm, I have been trying to do/understand something but since I ain't seen it, I cannot just tell you what it is.
less stubborn people (and people with other's depending on them) would have given up already.
This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism.
This is also incorrect:
> The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females.
Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
Aside from the fact this is incorrect, it's also rooted in a false assumption. It's a common mistake to believe the ecosystem is in some sort of steady state or equilibrium. It is not and never has been. The climate changes. The geology changes. Invasive species arrive. Someone wins an evolutionary arms race and wipes out the rest. Populations go through booms and busts - or even extinctions - because they consume resources too rapidly. There is no variable that is not in continual flux. Things only appear to be "steady state" on very short timescales, but attentive people have always noticed this - the ancient Greeks were aware of massive geographic changes, for example.
When too many variables change too fast or too far, we see mass extinctions (really just an increase in the extinction rate) as different species don't make it through the selection pressure. Are we causing one now? Sure, absolutely. But not because we're special. Because we're not. We like to believe we are wise, rational technocratic masters of nature. We are not. We are causing climate change and extinctions like every other species that begins to dominate (dominate may not even be the right word - some species that don't dominate produce massive 'destructive' changes.) Probably the earliest known example is the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. No amount of trying to be more 'rational' and 'sustainable' will produce an ecological equilibrium over anything but the very short term.
No, but Mother Nature has ample evidence of doing so. If we want to continue as a species we need a way to persist after the next apocalyptic natural disaster. We’re fortunate some ancient peoples lived in environments that forced them to build societies and progress technology - otherwise we might not know we’re one meteor away from extinction!
They band together to fight the male who has the pride so they can get the females.
The difference between humans and other mammals in these fights is that we are much more efficient at killing and that females are fertile all year round.
Not necessarily: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gay-lions-ma...
And if your definition of default must expand in order to include homosexuality then you really need to examine the benefit of saying that it is a "default."
You'll occasionally see it argued that the Mosuo are matriarchal, but what's going on is many people are desperate to try to find an example of matriarchy, and the Mosuo are as close as it gets. So yeah, if you squint, stand on one leg, and crook your head a bit it sort of looks like they might be.
What's really the case is that every single human society we know of has been some flavor of patriarchal.
How could that not be progress?
If we've never been able to do that before, but now can, we've moved from a state of inability to a state of ability. That is progress.
Now, if you view "progress" as something that is inherently positive, that is a bias you should check.
The article feels very much like a thesis in search of support, which might explain the laser like focus on one particular data point that appeared to support the author's premise. It also explains why criticism of the original research is dismissed as "cancel culture" rather than taken as a sign to at least look for other supporting data.
The motivation makes more sense if you look at the rest of that substack (I wasn't familiar with it, so I poked around a bit). The author evidently has a deep interest in sex and gender role topics viewed through a particular lens. The second post I looked at was basically incel ideology 101, complete with Becky, Chad, and links to Jordan Peterson. I'll save you a click, but apparently teenage girls are depressed because they're not having sex with incel teenage boys.
Given the rest of that blog, it's probably not surprising the author managed to boil down a topic as complex as the development of societies into a simple explanation about sex, backed by a single data point that's out of favor with actual professionals in the field.
It's not a direct analog, but the pacing, attitude and tactics suggest they have a worn and dogeared copy of Allan Bloom's treatise Closing of the American Mind on their desk. Though well written and speckled with reasonable arguments, Bloom plainly argued that 'civilized' 'reasonable' white protestant moral and cultural values are correct, and everyone will be better off once they adopt them. Anecdotally, the vast MRA diaspora also coats toxic ideological bullshit in truth nuggets to muddy the lines between them.
And your take on it is so utterly bizarre I can't believe you actually read it. He literally talks about how strange it is that the "Becky" concept exists as it never did when he was a teen (it seems equally weird to me).
The pleistocene megafauna would like to have a word with you.
However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game.
The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible.
This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources.
http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/origins_of_culture/
https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
Notably the causality runs in both directions here - the fighting over women is what prevents the population from falling into a Malthusian trap.
The next time someone tells you that pre-agricultural populations only spent 10 hours a week on work and the rest on leisure or whatever, you should reply asking what percentage of those populations died do to homicide. The answer might be revealing.
Did you miss the fact that the same pattern was observed in multiple societies, by multiple researchers, in places as far as Australia and Papua New Ghinea?
> What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc.
All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
Human societies did develop significantly over that time frame - e.g. the discovery that plants could be cultivated and bred to improve their desirable quantities was one breakthrough that happened >10K years ago, the steady development of more complex language and ultimately the recording of language in written form - it's just that there might not be much of a historical record of these developments. Almost the only thing that's been preserved are the stone tools, which also show a steady improvement over time.
The article claims otherwise:
As time went by, evidence for Chagnon's claims became too overwhelming to ignore for most anthropologists. Numerous other anthropologists came to the same conclusions as Chagnon, both before and after his work. From Australia to Papua New Guinea to South America, the same phenomenon has been observed: Men kill each other at high rates in conflicts that center around the distribution of women.
There is no "went back". That never stopped, and still continues today.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/feed
this premise, which indeed does operate largely without conscious acknowledgement, is the basis of belief in human rights.
Similarly democracy is just an analogy for battle. The bigger group wins, ideally with less blood shed.
No one should be under the illusion that democracy does anything other than try to minimize disquiet (it doesn't select the best by any other metric leadership necessarily). It does not even matter how informed the population is.
Back to the point. Why do we have human rights? Basically they are the things that were either fought for directly or got in at the same time.
They are now expanding but I don't think many realise why they were started and the expansion might reverse what won't is the things people are willing to pick up arms over
It's also interesting to look at the theories of human morals like Kohlberg's model. Very few humans reason with the post conventual moral stages.
Not necessarily true. Train a GPT on monkey sounds and you'll get a completely different result.
The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life.
Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures.
[0] https://www.old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6...