Gaps in human history you can fit a civilization in?

[adam_grif]

Although a steaming pile of shit in gameplay terms, I always found the setting of Too Human to be really interesting. The Norse pantheon were cyborg protectors of a prehistorical advanced human civilization.

These short films are related, and interesting.

[PeZook]

Besides, if you own enough slaves, what does it matter if the glider doesn't work? So he goes splat, so what? Make some changes, put another slave on there, threaten punishment to his family if he doesn't do it and make him try with the new version, because the profit you could make with a working version would be worthwhile, since if nothing else, you'd suddenly be an Idea Guy who people would hire to make shit happen.

Slaves in ancient societies were actually more expensive and precious than most people think: to the point it was more economical to build the pyramids using paid laborers and peasants. Probably had something to do with the fact you had to win a war to get a good supply, and that meant risking getting stabbed in the face/dying of dysentery/heat exhaustion/cholera/poisonous insects/arrows shot by people you were trying to enslave

Anyway, the payoff was probably not worth it to most. Not when an educated person was virtually guaranteed a large(ish) income by the virtue of being able to read, write and do basic math.

[Tolya]

Besides, if you own enough slaves, what does it matter if the glider doesn't work? So he goes splat, so what? Make some changes, put another slave on there, threaten punishment to his family if he doesn't do it and make him try with the new version, because the profit you could make with a working version would be worthwhile, since if nothing else, you'd suddenly be an Idea Guy who people would hire to make shit happen.

Exactly what PeZook said before. Slaves were never cheap. Add that to the fact that slaves life was in general disregard mostly in the era of American slavery, where influx of fresh slaves was steady and unrelated to a war. You could either poach the poor fuckers yourself using superior technology (guns vs. spears) or just buy them off from another african tribe who just conquered another tribe and are looking to offload some fresh manpower for money or supplies.

In ancient Rome for example, it was not uncommon for slaves to become important politicians. For example, the emperor Diocletian is by some sources said to be born as a slave (some other sources point out that his father was a slave and his son was free). Slaves in Rome could work for their own needs and even own property. Slaves of the rich Roman families enjoyed a much better life than that of poor but free Roman citizens.

They were by no means free men and there are lots of stories of slave abuse (The emperor Hadrian once supposedly poked his slave's eye in a rage). But having slaves was a costly business and I cannot imagine anyone in antiquity using them as disposable test pilots of unproven technology.

In antiquity, although slaves had almost no civil rights, they constitut

[Simon_Jester]

Since it is hard to explain the lack of stone remains for our lost civilization, why insist on them having built with stone? If we instead said that they built everything out of wood and mud daub, they can have huge cities which would be entirely lost just centuries after being abandoned.

Because it's a bit unlikely that this would happen. We see ceremonial stone sites in very early societies, ones that were only just barely up out of the agricultural revolution. Monumental stone architecture is so ubiquitous that I'd expect to see it in the ruins of ancient cultures.

Why not? People have been wanting to fly since we saw a bird do it, and have been trying to figure it out since.

Yes, but for most of history it has been generally accepted that people can't fly. Everyone dreams of flying, but everyone dreams of getting to have sex with the stunningly attractive partner of their choice, too. Not everyone gets to do it.

So first you have to reduce the population of possible fliers to those who actually consider flying an option, without being so insane that they try to fly by jumping off a building without aid of a glider. Then you have to winnow that group down to the people who are so incredibly rich that they can afford to kill slaves flying the things (and when is it safe enough that they get to fly it?). Then you have to winnow it down further to people who are that rich and dumb enough to accept that they're going through all this expense for what amounts to a parlor trick.

...because the profit you could make with a working version would be worthwhile, since if nothing else, you'd suddenly be an Idea Guy who people would hire to make shit happen.

No you wouldn't. You'd be the eccentric nobleman who killed a dozen slaves inventing a glider. The kind of society where this could happen didn't work the way you think it does.

[D.Turtle]

The whole glider thing is just completely silly. Look at how long it took people to find out that hot air rises and make use of it for hot air balloons - something vastly simpler to understand and easier to implement than a glider.

[Temujin]

Besides, if you own enough slaves, what does it matter if the glider doesn't work? So he goes splat, so what? Make some changes, put another slave on there, threaten punishment to his family if he doesn't do it and make him try with the new version, because the profit you could make with a working version would be worthwhile, since if nothing else, you'd suddenly be an Idea Guy who people would hire to make shit happen.

Slaves in ancient societies were actually more expensive and precious than most people think: to the point it was more economical to build the pyramids using paid laborers and peasants. Probably had something to do with the fact you had to win a war to get a good supply, and that meant risking getting stabbed in the face/dying of dysentery/heat exhaustion/cholera/poisonous insects/arrows shot by people you were trying to enslave

Anyway, the payoff was probably not worth it to most. Not when an educated person was virtually guaranteed a large(ish) income by the virtue of being able to read, write and do basic math.

Egypt also had a massive food surplus, and hence a massive population surplus, making widespread slavery there unnecessary and uncommon at least until Persian/Greek/Roman domination. I don't know how occupation by these cultures affected the practice of slavery in Egypt, though I would think it might increase, especially under Roman rule.

[Sea Skimmer]

Egypt also had a massive food surplus, and hence a massive population surplus, making widespread slavery there unnecessary and uncommon at least until Persian/Greek/Roman domination. I don't know how occupation by these cultures affected the practice of slavery in Egypt, though I would think it might increase, especially under Roman rule.

Just as importantly they also had the Nile floods covering the fields. So the Pyramid work provided a way for the government to keep them all busy during flood season and justify its taxation. This is not a typical situation really.

[Iosef Cross]

Looking at the history, only the last couple thousand years have been documented at all. And homo sapiens has existed much longer than that. Why was the initial progress of the early societies so slow and why has it sped up so much in the last couple of hundred years that allowed us to go from making castles from rock to putting a man on the moon?

Because in the last hundreds of years there had been a unique concentration of population and the development of institutions, like private property rights, with together enabled a massive division of labor across hundreds of millions of people. The development of means to store and propagate information (writing) facilitated the continuous accumulation of knowledge.

Before modern times, other civilizations had a much smaller degree of division of labor. The average pre industrial civilization of 500 years ago (Europe and China, for example) had 75-80% of it's population living as subsistence farmers, while only 20-25% of the population participated in the monetary economy.

Any thoughts on this? I don't buy any of the Deniken's crap or any other theories, but from time to time the thought that some kind of an advanced human civilization could have existed 20,000 years ago which we have no knowledge about occasionaly gets into my head. And by advanced I don't necessarily mean flying machines, just something much more complex than living in caves, making rock axes and scribbling on the wall incomprehensibly.

It is possible, though improbable. They would leave more archaeological records and influences.

[Iosef Cross]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

The most awesome device found that was developed before the 16th century was the Antikythera mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism). It was made in the 1st century BCE, probably in Rhodes, and was more advanced than nearly anything made before the 17-18th centuries.

[Iosef Cross]

But as for the past... there is the notion that the past was more advanced than we thought. There was that funky clockwork computer thing that was found in the Aegean sea...

The Greek and Roman civilizations certainly were more advanced than thought until fairly recently. By the late Empire the Romans had gathered virtually everything needed for true industrialization to start except the printing press. The lack of cheap and rapid dissemination of knowledge meant that the feats of individual Roman engineers were not as widely known as thy could have been and it was also the main reason why so many of them were forgotten after the fall of Rome.

I agree with you, however, the date of peak development of the ancient classical civilization was under the Early Roman Empire, with can be illustrated by this single graph:



It is an indicator of volume of maritime trade, since the larger the number of ships trading, the larger the number of shipwrecks.

It also is a good indicator of the possibility of decline and fall of civilizations.

[Bedlam]

I'd argue that the number of wrecks is not nesserily a good guide of the ammount of trade going on. The safety of ships would also be a big factor as would where the trade is taking place relative to where we are looking for / can discover wrecks and also how long a certain type of ship remains detectable underwater would also be important.

[Iosef Cross]

The number of wrecks is possibly positively correlated to safety. Since the more ships you have, the better the average safety, but the higher is the total number of wrecks. That's because the more ships you have, the higher is the incentive and probability of developments in safety. However, the larger the number of ships, the larger tends to be the total number of shipwrecks.

For example, if you have 500 ships and lose 50 per year, then after a few centuries you get 5000 ships, but lose only 250 per year, the rate of loss will go down by 50%, however the total number of wrecks will increase.

Or you would believe that the collapse in the number of shipwrecks between the 1st century BCE and the 8th century CE was because of the dramatic improvements in the safety of shipping?

The decrease in shipwrecks between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE indicates an increase in safety, due to the absence of wars. The decrease from the 2nd century on indicates a decrease in the volume of trade and in economic regression.

[Seydlitz_k]

My first major problem with this is question is that everyone seems to assume that advancing technology and creation of civilization is the goal of humanity, instead of just the means to an end (The end being surviving.). There have been a couple of innacurate statments made about 'pre-technological' socities. The big ones are:

1.) Shorter life span. - Your average paleolithic human lived longer, in better health, and with less disease than people in many technological pre-industrial socities. This is a combination of a greater variety of foodstuffs, especially meats, more movement, and most importantly, low population density. This meant that it was much harder for disease to spread throughout the population, and so there wouldn't have been many great virulent outbreaks, like the Black Death.

2.) Free Time - This one is important. I need to find the source, but I'm fairly certain that most hunter-gatherer societies have/had a lot more free time than we do. It was something like 5 hours a day sourcing and preparing food, and the rest is free time. You don't need free time to develop technology: In fact, personally I think quite the opposite is true. The more work you have to do, the more ways you'll try and find ways to decrease your workload and increase your results (That's what I do! ). I'm pretty sure the first guy who decided to put a metal cap on his plow had the idea while he was observing his wooden plow get worn away, and not while he was sitting by the fire listening to stories. Civilization is just a vicious cycle of that. Trying to find better, faster ways of doing more stuff, while putting in less effort. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if we had more free time, civilization would develop slower. I'm pretty sure since the Industrial revolution, humans have been working more and more each day - or at least, more intensely (A medieval farmer would have spent most of his day tending his farm. But that is a lot slower, less stressful work, and he could take his time. Modern jobs are probably a lot more mentally and psychologically exhausting and demanding, and a lot more gets done in a shorter period of time).

3.) Agriculture - Learning to grow stuff does not require one to sit still. You can observe the life cycle of plants as a hunter-gatherer. Especially since most of these moved seasonally, so they'd actually see things growing as they would move from winter to summer camp. Plus, stuff like basic horticulture leaves no marks. Humans could have easily been growing simple fruits or tubers on a small scale for hundreds of thousands of years, and we would have no way of proving that in the archaeological record. Ethnographic analysis here can't help prove anything, because most currently existing hunter-gatherer tribes live in extremes which would have been uncommon in the Paleolithic.
Being able to grow stuff also does not equal agriculture on a wide scale either. Lots of small, indigenous tribes grow things on a small scale. Often supplemented by hunting.

4.) Sedentary lifestyles - You don't need to farm to sit still, basically. You also don't need massive amounts of technology to sustain massive, fairly complex civilizations (ie. the Mesoamericans, although others have been named in this thread already). What sitting still might lead to is a growth in population. You can raise more children. Human babies are quite useless in their first few years. Hell, it takes what, a whole year to learn to walk? And it'd probably take 5 years or more for a kid to be able to keep up with a moving tribe unassisted. So even if you have more than enough food to raise multiple children, a mother would only physically be able to take care of one every 5-10 years probably. I doubt most Paleolithic women had more than 2 or 3 children in their lifetime. Which is more or less the number needed if the population is to remain stable.
If you stop moving, you now no longer have to carry your children around, and so can look after more of them at once. And since you don't have to carry them around 24/7, there are probably more chances for mating as well, and so more children.

I think I wanted to make some other points, but it's late, and i'm going to bed. In short though, I think your looking at it backwards. There are no "gaps". Technology develops so fast, because technology breeds more technology fairly rapidly. We got here by coincidence really. Nothing which happened needed to happen. Once the ball got rolling though, it just started picking up speed exponentially. Think "evolution". It's simply randomn chance.

[montypython]

Stonework? Yeah, sure the Egyptians were quite skilled masons, but I find it rather silly you haven't mentioned the "hero Engine", the Aeolipile. I mean, steam engine. Doesn't get more awesome than that. Rather, that is kind of late for the discussion, but to develop a precursor to the Steam Engine, which wouldn't really come about again until the 1500's.

The Aeolipile is neat indeed, but the reason it was made so early is related to it being such a dead end design. Uncontained steam expansion like that will never generate any useful amount of work. At least not when you are limited to iron and a coal-wood fire, which places a major limit on how fast you can generate steam. Making a steam engine with valves and pistons that can operate at higher pressures is far more demanding technology.

Could the gap between attaining fusion bombs and fusion reactors be considered comparable, out of curiosity?

[Simon_Jester]

Not at all. Fusion bombs aren't a parlor trick; aeolipiles are.

[Serafina]

1.) Shorter life span. - Your average paleolithic human lived longer, in better health, and with less disease than people in many technological pre-industrial socities. This is a combination of a greater variety of foodstuffs, especially meats, more movement, and most importantly, low population density. This meant that it was much harder for disease to spread throughout the population, and so there wouldn't have been many great virulent outbreaks, like the Black Death.

Proof that this applied when compared to upper-class (or even middle-class) romans.
Especially upper class, wo had clean water, better medicine, a great variety of food and no hard physical labour.

2.) Free Time - This one is important. I need to find the source, but I'm fairly certain that most hunter-gatherer societies have/had a lot more free time than we do. It was something like 5 hours a day sourcing and preparing food, and the rest is free time. You don't need free time to develop technology: In fact, personally I think quite the opposite is true. The more work you have to do, the more ways you'll try and find ways to decrease your workload and increase your results (That's what I do! ). I'm pretty sure the first guy who decided to put a metal cap on his plow had the idea while he was observing his wooden plow get worn away, and not while he was sitting by the fire listening to stories. Civilization is just a vicious cycle of that. Trying to find better, faster ways of doing more stuff, while putting in less effort. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if we had more free time, civilization would develop slower. I'm pretty sure since the Industrial revolution, humans have been working more and more each day - or at least, more intensely (A medieval farmer would have spent most of his day tending his farm. But that is a lot slower, less stressful work, and he could take his time. Modern jobs are probably a lot more mentally and psychologically exhausting and demanding, and a lot more gets done in a shorter period of time).

Bollocks.
Not only am i pretty damn sure that your claim that a hunter-gatherer society had only to work (on average) 5 hours a day is bullshit - but free time is HIGHLY valuable for inventions.
Look, it's quite simple: If your farmer has to spend half his day out in the field, he doesn't have the time to work out any inventions. Inventing something is a lot more complicated than "gosh, it would be nice if i had a better tool".
A Hunter-gatherer had to spend time to get his food to survive, to craft clothes and tools, take care of his familiy etc.
By comparision, an upper-class roman had to do none of these things. Sure, lot's of them had important offices, but there was a significant part that could spend time just thinking about problems.

In essence - "free time" as far as culutural advancment goes is defined as "time you do not have to spend on survival". You can see a pretty good correlation (and likely causation) between the amount of people that don't have to work directly for their own food, and cultural advancement. That includes people who work, but get their food indirectly - such as craftsmen. Having people who can spend their time on thinking is the next important step - why do you thik priests invented so much over the course of history? They had time to think.

3.) Agriculture - Learning to grow stuff does not require one to sit still. You can observe the life cycle of plants as a hunter-gatherer. Especially since most of these moved seasonally, so they'd actually see things growing as they would move from winter to summer camp. Plus, stuff like basic horticulture leaves no marks. Humans could have easily been growing simple fruits or tubers on a small scale for hundreds of thousands of years, and we would have no way of proving that in the archaeological record. Ethnographic analysis here can't help prove anything, because most currently existing hunter-gatherer tribes live in extremes which would have been uncommon in the Paleolithic.
Being able to grow stuff also does not equal agriculture on a wide scale either. Lots of small, indigenous tribes grow things on a small scale. Often supplemented by hunting.

Again: If your whole days consists of labouring in the field, you'll have no time to think of new solutions for anything.
But if you are a monk who spends hours with reading, writing and thinking anyway - yeah, odds are much better.

The important step of agriculture was that a society could no afford MORE people that did not contribute towards survival (of the society), or at least that they had to spend less time on it. Which did just that - giving them time to think.
A scientists doesn't directly contribute to the survival of society: He produces no food, no tools necessary for that - neither shelter, clothes etc.
However - thinking ultimately produces better ways to do just that. The scientist may very well increase the output of every farmer, invent ways to save labour etc. - which contributes directly to the fitness of his society.

4.) Sedentary lifestyles - You don't need to farm to sit still, basically. You also don't need massive amounts of technology to sustain massive, fairly complex civilizations (ie. the Mesoamericans, although others have been named in this thread already). What sitting still might lead to is a growth in population. You can raise more children. Human babies are quite useless in their first few years. Hell, it takes what, a whole year to learn to walk? And it'd probably take 5 years or more for a kid to be able to keep up with a moving tribe unassisted. So even if you have more than enough food to raise multiple children, a mother would only physically be able to take care of one every 5-10 years probably. I doubt most Paleolithic women had more than 2 or 3 children in their lifetime. Which is more or less the number needed if the population is to remain stable.
If you stop moving, you now no longer have to carry your children around, and so can look after more of them at once. And since you don't have to carry them around 24/7, there are probably more chances for mating as well, and so more children.

Yes, fishing or extremely rich regions might allow for fixed settlements without agriculture.
But again - the progress of a society is dependent on people who have time to think. Reducing the amount of time each (or some) individual has to spend on getting food is the prime way to do that, and agriculture is apparently a good way to do so.

Oh, and if each "Paleolithic women hadc no more than 2 or 3 children in their lifetime" - given high infant mortality, that would lead to an unstable population. Birth rate is not limited by available food - stable population is.

[PeZook]

That part about free time and better diet is actually true. The problem was that neither of those things was assured, or even probable: it was possible for a hunter to go out and be back inside the hour with a deer on his back, and it was equally possible he'd be gone for the next three weeks and come back empty handed if the herd moved away from the settlement. Which realy sucks if he just had a baby.

Agriculture allows for extremely long-term planning, even with all the shit like crop failures, blights and war.

[Serafina]

That part about free time and better diet is actually true. The problem was that neither of those things was assured, or even probable: it was possible for a hunter to go out and be back inside the hour with a deer on his back, and it was equally possible he'd be gone for the next three weeks and come back empty handed if the herd moved away from the settlement. Which realy sucks if he just had a baby.

Agriculture allows for extremely long-term planning, even with all the shit like crop failures, blights and war.

What i said: Average time.
Working out inventions takes time, and intterupting it can easily disrupt the process.
Therefore, someone who can do it on a regular schedule has an significant advantage.

[Junghalli]

The theory that foragers were healthier than agriculturalists is not without anthropological evidence. If you do a Google search on the height of skeletons and agriculture you'll probably find a bunch of sites that talk about it.

As far as the positive effects of civilization on invention go, I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest factor isn't time but rather that foragers tend to have to be somewhat mobile so you don't want to have to cart a lot of heavy stuff around. That inherently puts a pretty serious limit on what a potential inventor has to work with.

I imagine it'd be pretty hard to invent steam engines if you have to be able to pack up and move everything on a regular basis.

Also, of course, there's the factor that an agricultural society has the surplus to support a significant class of people who do not engage in food gathering/production at all - but this doesn't necessarily mean the peasants who until recently still made up the vast majority of the population had more free time or were better off. For starters the nonproductive class tended to also be the elites who demanded your crops in the form of taxation and I imagine the negotiations for what percentage you got to keep weren't exactly egalitarian. Sure, maybe theoretically you could support yourself with less work, but your nobleman sure wouldn't happy to see you enjoying yourself when you could be using that time to make more wealth for him instead, and it's not the brightest idea to make him unhappy if you can avoid it if you know what I mean...

[madd0ct0r]

not sure how much free time is required for inventing, espcially not at the basic level.

Philosophy, pure science and religion all require time spent staring at the sky, but practical inventions are normally driven by need.

eg, back when i was a steel worker, one of my tasks was feeding small sheets of aluminum into a corner cutting press (the machine itself was Victorian!)

the metal burrs pressing repeatedly into the pad of my thumb started to cut quite painfully, so one quiet period I turned a small piece of scrap into a type of thimble or thumb guard.
Workmen tend to accumulate a dozen or so of these bodge solutions, or jigs, to help them with particular problems.
Heck, it's where the concept of tools first came from.

This approach requires:
1) A problem
2) Material available for a technical solution - Normally, a person will solve a problem using stuff they have, or decide it's currently insoluble and move on. I used steel scrap because that's what was available. On a building site, guides tend to be made from scrap wood or pvc pipe, because that's what is available.

3)Time to 'build' the solution - normally less then you think. hunter-gatherer's did have the downtime, as did farmers (especially in winter). Projects might be a 'hobby' built slowly over half hour's of spare time.
Alternatively, it's likely a tribe/village would have a specialist who you might approach with the problem. Assuming obsessive technical people were as common then as now, problems might be attacked and solved, purely because they were interesting, as well as helping out a friend.


the problem lies in the the transmittal of these solutions.