A Human Paradox

[warpus]

Something's been nagging me... a question, one that needs answering. There's no stopping "us", we left Africa and absorbed or conquered earlier peoples who had left Africa before us. We've reached the ends of the world and now we're headed for the stars. Its in our blood... Why did it take us so long to leave Africa?

Look at all the other species on the planet, they each have their own habitats. It's very rare that a species covers the whole planet.

We were adapted to life in Africa and so that's where we lived.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

the paradox is we spent ~>100,000 years or more sitting in Africa and took maybe half that to 'conquer' the world

Language and technology didn't exist? People were leaving Africa more than a million years ago

That doesn't appear to be a paradox. Also, you seem to have just said two contradictory things about the timescale there. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Try to apply this to a real-world example. Why are there many fewer deaths nowadays due to natural disasters such as floods? It's because humans are able to make plans for hypothetical possibilities (ie. plan how to conduct search & rescue operations and decide where evacuation centres will be before a storm hits) and they're able to communicate this information to everyone else. If nobody knew what was going on, the death toll would be in the thousands or tens of thousands, rather than in the dozens. You can't "spread out" if your particular group of people died from an inability to survive natural disasters or other situations in which communication and planning for the future - being able to imagine a future in the first place, even - are crucial factors.

No... I wasn't asking that question myself. I was asking if that was what the supposed paradox was. Maybe I should have put it in quotes.

 

[Senethro]

There isn't a paradox or that great a mystery imo. The world was already full of humans who reproduced at similar rates to anatomically modern humans. It took a long time to displace or merge with them.

 

[Berzerker]

Anthropologists found artifacts in Neanderthal gravesites that suggest there was an awareness of death in the abstract, and there may have been a belief in some sort of afterlife.

they may have acquired that awareness from us

 

[Birdjaguar]

they may have acquired that awareness from us

Why would you suggest that? Any evidence? There is no reason that Neanderthals couldn't have come to that conclusion on their own.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

they may have acquired that awareness from us

And they may have thought it up all by themselves.

Even some other mammals mourn their dead and perform actions that accompany such mourning.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

the paradox is we spent ~>100,000 years or more sitting in Africa and took maybe half that to 'conquer' the world

Language and technology didn't exist? People were leaving Africa more than a million years ago

Regarding human development, I think the key to understanding it is to understand how your environment shapes you, advances you, but also limits you. A special feature of humans is that their brain grows and develops for about two decades until it is finally fully developed. The reason for this seems clear: The brain only realizes its potential when confronted with the pessary outside stimuli. Otherwise, I claim, a human is just another beast. More complicated, but not essentially different. So my theory is that it took a long long time to get into civilization territory because it took a long long time for the interplay of brain development and environment to lead anywhere when it started from basically zero. Imagine it like a snowball becoming an alavanche. At first it is very tiny and slow and by this very nature of it it can only grow very slowly. For a long time, nothing significant happens. But when it finally catches momentum due to its slowly accumulated size, it becomes a force of nature like few other.

So basically: humans just aren't very smart by themselves. But when stimulated well, they can become very smart. But with no smart humans around at first, where is the stimuli supposed to come from? It has to emerge by tiny tiny baby steps. And that takes time. But once it is there, it can be used with swift effect.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The brain only realizes its potential when confronted with the pessary

Wow. I've really been using them wrong.

 

[Birdjaguar]

...the pessary outside stimuli.

It seems to sound quite provocative, but it might also be just a meaningless string of words.

 

[Hygro]

autocorrect?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Naturally it was supposed to say necessary. But now I know what a pessary is.

 

[Hrothbern]

Interesting. I didn't realize there are people who don't get such reactions from particular kinds of music. Do you include those who cry when they hear a piece of music that really touches their emotions?

From what I read from several articles quantitative measurements focussed on the goose bumps also measured by galvanic skin resistance. And yes some people get a lump in their throat as well up to watery eyes.
Percentages mentioned in one article 50-86%, but the amount of the frisson effect differing, showing differences between people.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-orgasms-from-listening-to-music-59719

If I look to my own experiences, including lump in my throat (and I guess I am somewhat of a sentimental old fool), it happens more to music that is attached to special moments in my life and music I know well and that I listen to with bigger intervals. For my job I often had to travel big distances by car and when I got tired and sleepy I had enough music on my I-pod to choose from and refresh me, before I got to my last resort of singing aloud.
Like this one:

To old hominins:
The power of music and rhythm, the group binding power of singing together is probably very old. And I believe that group binding was important as evolutionary strenth, because it allows for better social cohesion and group altruism in bigger groups.
Big choirs being an example. Gregorian music. I think also that the big pipe organs with the big pipes for low frequencies were popular when invented for binding the early protestant churching people in some exalted sphere.
Some time ago there was an ancient cave temple discovered in Malta with very special accoustics for 110 Hz., giving consciousness changing effects. I saw a documentary on that, hearing the accoustic effects. Mindblowing.
An interesting article on that: https://phys.org/wire-news/16438660...acoustics-to-alter-consciousness-and-spe.html
This awareness about our response was seemingly everywhere around the world. http://www.ancient-wisdom.com/sonics.htm
Again here: how long ago did homonins discover that ???
Many lived already hundreds of thousands years ago in caves. You would almost guess that they discovered special accoustic spots pretty fast.

Even some other mammals mourn their dead and perform actions that accompany such mourning.

Yes, like elephants mourn their death, their fellow elephants touching lightly the mourning mother/child to show their group morning. I remember a documentary about a mother elephant, that as part of the every year nomadic travels, came back on the spot where her child died, the skull still lying there, and she kept on caressing the skull, moving it around a bit.
Another story, not on a vid, is when the elephant whisperer Lawrence Anthony died, the two herds he had helped against being shot came visiting his house.
"There are two elephant herds at Thula Thula. According to his son Dylan, both arrived at the Anthony family compound shortly after Anthony’s death.
“They had not visited the house for a year and a half and it must have taken them about 12 hours to make the journey,” Dylan is quoted in various local news accounts. “The first herd arrived on Sunday and the second herd, a day later. They all hung around for about two days before making their way back into the bush.”
http://www.beliefnet.com/inspiratio...-mourn-death-of-famed-elephant-whisperer.aspx

To the old hominins:
Some years ago the bones of more than 1,500 specimens were discovered of a new sub-sahara hominin named the Homo Naledi in a big cave complex near Johannesburg.
The Naledi looked very much like us, was slender and walking on two legs, with developed hands, etc.... but a brain half the size of us.
The intriguing thing was that the bones were piled up at one place, in a cave room seemingly not normally accessible than a narrow shaft above that cave.
"as if they were buried there"
Does that proof much ?
I think it shows that they did not eat them (no scratches), they did want to protect them from being eaten from predators, =>... they considered that dead body as something valuable.
the big article:
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...inct-human-found-in-cave-may-rewrite-history/
The later article dating Homo Nadeli found at 250,000 years old:
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...only-250000-years-old-heres-why-that-matters/

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

And they may have thought it up all by themselves.

Even some other mammals mourn their dead and perform actions that accompany such mourning.

I recently watched an episode of Earth where something similar took place. They sent in a monkey spy cam, and then this happened.

 

[Berzerker]

Why would you suggest that? Any evidence? There is no reason that Neanderthals couldn't have come to that conclusion on their own.

And they may have thought it up all by themselves.

Even some other mammals mourn their dead and perform actions that accompany such mourning.

Evidence for ritualistic burials by Neanderthals before contact with 'us' is sketchy, the Middle/Near East appears to be an area of overlapping populations about 100kya when red ocher in burials became popular.

 

[Commodore]

As for humans "headed for the stars" I don't see any evidence of that happening.

Same here. There's more resistance to space exploration than ever before. Too many short-sighted fools who throw out the "we need to solve our problems here before we go into space" line. Never mind the fact that space exploration WILL solve all of our problems "down here" eventually.

 

[Birdjaguar]

they may have acquired that awareness from us

Evidence for ritualistic burials by Neanderthals before contact with 'us' is sketchy, the Middle/Near East appears to be an area of overlapping populations about 100kya when red ocher in burials became popular.

Or perhaps we acquired it from them or it was jointly acquired from somewhere else. Burial sites are one source of such thinking. Are you saying that it is the only acceptable source? Could people have had such thoughts, but acted differently on those thoughts before they settled on burial?

 

[Archon_Wing]

Snowball. Progress isn't linear.

I mean it's obvious humans couldn't expand until they researched Alphabet and Currency, as well as getting Bronze to defeat the wild animals.

But really, humans being the only ones to come up with this kind of society and building civilizations means that it took a long while to merely even lay the foundation. It's not a common thing, and consider that humans aren't particularly special otherwise; other animals are stronger, faster, and have superior reaction times. I mean it doesn't matter how much time you have if you don't even have basic tools at your disposal.

And it it seems so obvious if you shrink the scale. The idea of sending objects into space would be unfathomable 150 years ago. And look how essential the internet is, when it was a curiosity about 20 years ago.

 

[Hygro]

Berzerker, is your paradox that humans grew exponentially instead of linearly?

 

[Berzerker]

Berzerker, is your paradox that humans grew exponentially instead of linearly?

The paradox is the amount of time it took for us to leave Africa

Or perhaps we acquired it from them or it was jointly acquired from somewhere else. Burial sites are one source of such thinking. Are you saying that it is the only acceptable source? Could people have had such thoughts, but acted differently on those thoughts before they settled on burial?

What other source did you have in mind? I can think of only (rock) art which is more subject to dating and interpretive problems. Of course the belief in an afterlife could be older, but burial practices are the best indicator of such a belief in the archaeological record.