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A Hominins timeline to help put things in perspective: 7-6 million years ago: Possible divergence of the lineage leading to humans from the lineage leading t

• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Thank you! Always good to see our family tree when talking about the extremely recent transition to sapiens
• akiselev 3y ago
  In addition, a timeline of culture & technology: Oldowan industry - simple flaked stone tools (~2.9-1.7 million years ago) Acheulean industry - advanced tools like hand axes (~1.7 million - ~160,000 years ago) Archaic humans in Southeast Asian islands like Indonesia (~1.8-1 million years ago, dating is a bit uncertain on this one) First control of fire (~1 million - ~700,000 years ago) First archaic humans living in colder climates like Atapuerca, Spain (~800,000 years ago) First wooden spears denoting a change in hunting tech (~400,000 years ago) Widespread control of fire (~400,000 years ago) ==> First homo sapiens <== (~300,000 years ago) First neanderthals arrive in Europe (~230,000-150,000 years ago) First use of ochre pigment for symbolic purposes (~190,000 years ago) Body lice genetically diverge from head lice due to clothing (~170,000 years ago) Mousterian industry - points, scrapers, denticulates, notches, and awls (~300,000-40,000 years ago) First time eating seafood at Pinnacle Point (~150,000 years ago) Humans start collecting and using shell beads (~130,000 years ago) First heat treated material - silcrete (~110,000 years ago) First compound adhesive leads to tar-hafted tools (~100,000 years ago) First bed (~77,000 years ago) First bow and arrow in Sibudu (~72,000–60,000 years ago) Arrival in Australia (and thus first boat?) (~70,000-65,000 years ago) First musical instrument (flute) (~60,000 years ago) First burial ritual at Shanidar Cave (~60,000 years ago but controversial) First sewing needle (~45,000 years ago) Aurignacian industry - true homo sapien tools like microlithics, blades, projectile points, pressure flaking, split-base bone points (~43,000-26,000 years ago) Gravettian industry - Bow and arrow, harpoons, and darts come into their own (~33,000-22,000 years ago) Solutrean & Magdalenian industry - flint tools, cave art, etc. (~22,000-12,000 years ago) Disclaimer: "First [...]" means "oldest surviving evidence of [...]". I tried my best to select a realistic middle ground age but each one has error bars of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and there's a lot of overlap in industries. This list is so incomplete it's not even funny :)
  • idiocrat 3y ago
    A thought experiment. It has been said that if a modern "average" human were transported back in time, it would be difficult for that person to build anything useful, because of the lack of material manufacturing (c.f. "Toaster from Scratch" and "Primitive Technology" channels) and lack of specific knowledge. So goes my thought experiment. If I were transported 100,000 years back, I would big-scale industrialize the production of soap blocks and then build soap distribution networks over wast lands (the King of Soap). Soap is quite easy to produce with wood ash. I would also mass-scale press-print porno comics (using wooden plate carvings). I think these two what defines civilization and will give me a chance for not being killed as a practitioner of witchcraft.
    • f6v 3y ago
      Or you’d just cut your toe on an rock and die (with no medical care).
      • alganet 3y ago
        Soap actually increases his chance of survival in this scenario. Clean wound == less chance of infection. Explaining what soap does and why people should value it would be the real challenge. Communication in general would need to be built from scratch. No english, no latin languages, no modern gestures like thumbs up and hand shakes, no common ground. Depending on the era, I would bet on agriculture and fermentation as my empire-building tech. Wine first, then bread which is a little bit harder. Maybe spices also, I heard some pretty large empires were built on the power of funny flavors.
        • brabel 3y ago
          It's kind of funny that you think you would be able to produce wine 100,000 years ago. Do you know what grapes used to look like back then? Well, they were absolutely not the giant balls of sweetness we see today :D. They became that after thousands of years of selection by humans. Which first had to "invent" agriculture, which was not easy and it's still quite unclear whether the earliest civilizations that adopted it were better off until they actually became capable of creating large city-states which could then go on to dominate all their neighbours and started accumulating power. So, 100,000 years ago you would need to convince people to join you in this crazy agriculture thing without any metal tools.... without domesticated animals either, by the way... as that would still be thousands of years in the future... Finally, just taking a large amount of food and leaving it for a long time to ferment somewhere well protected, while everyone around is hungry, would be a huge challenge already. You might need to protect it both from people and from very large wild animals that had not gone extinct yet and would love to take that food from you (and likely use you as food also).