Yeah I agree, I don’t like changing headlines but this one is pure science gore.
I like the article despite that however.
Comment on 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshell engravings reveal a surprisingly sophisticated human mind
artifex@piefed.zip 17 hours ago
I don’t like this headline. A human from 60,000 years ago would be anatomically identical to a modern human, brain included, so of course they mind would be able to produce sophisticated ideas. A better headline would have been about there are few examples of abstract mathematics from that long ago.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz@sopuli.xyz 15 hours ago
Maeve@lemmygrad.ml 16 hours ago Sacred geometry is millennia old.
cmbabul@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
The Dawn of Everything makes this point fabulously and with loads of historical examples. The urge to look at the peoples of the past as primitive and lesser is a major fault in our understanding of ourselves and human societies
Eq0@literature.cafe 16 hours ago
I’ve been reading it and I recommend it m mainly for this specific reason! Just because they were born long ago doesn’t make them stupid. And, thinking about it, maybe not having a massively time consuming and mind numbing job actually helped them develop their minds and thoughts.
cmbabul@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
And that calls into question the generally accepted notion that the way we’ve organized our societies has been getting progressively better over the timeline of our species and that we might be able to take some of the aspects of our modern world that meet that criteria(solar electricity, medical advancements, etc) can be applied to older paradigms. Fusing old and new to create a better world for human kind. Revolutionary book
Eq0@literature.cafe 16 hours ago
Reminds me of Harari’s Sapiens, supporting the idea that most revolutions, starting from the agricultural one, actually made our lives globally worse.
artifex@piefed.zip 16 hours ago
One of my favorite books. Though I have to read it with 10 Wikipedia tabs opened.
cmbabul@slrpnk.net 16 hours ago
Yeah that’s more than understandable, it’s dense as fuck, but well worth the effort!
sulfidedisburseangledafternoontipper@piefed.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
I made my book club read it a couple of years ago. A few people did the audiobook. Even though I think it might be one of the most important and fascinating books of the last century, I cannot imagine the soporific power of that audiobook.
I look at humanity today and feel we’re quite primitive, worse than they were ages ago when they didn’t really have a choice.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Even in short timespans, I was downvoted harshly recently for disagreeing with somebody who said that the tech we use today was “unrealistic science fiction 50 years ago”.