Comment by sho_hn
1 month ago
> I would wager that if you could travel back in time to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, you’d find they’re just like us.
I find this viewpoint surprisingly underutilized in institutional history and archeology sometimes. I occasionally watch documentaries with distinguished talking heads on e.g. egyptology and what not, and they often bend over backwards to find complicated explanations that defy all "this is just not how humans or human organizations operate" logic. For example, analyzing an impressive building and then assuming that the same people capable of constructing it also made a basic mistake or in other ways assuming they were daft. Or requiring a complex lore/spiritual explanation for something that can be equally explained by classic big org fuckups.
The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because
1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and
2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.
Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
For a long time, I also somehow thought that people from earlier eras were less intelligent—simply because, in retrospect, all those obvious mistakes are so apparent. It took considerable mental effort for me to accept that people back then were probably just like us today, only living under different circumstances.
Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.
It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.
We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.
We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
Humans today really are smarter, i.e., better at abstract reasoning--see the Flynn effect. That's partly due to better nutrition and lower disease load, but also due to modern education and lifestyles, which force people to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
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I think this is compounded by the correlation of beliefs between modern cranks who reject their education and believe what science now knows to be absurdities like "the Earth is flat" or "carrying this crystal pendant will please the gods and protect you from getting sick" with smart ancient people who believed the Earth is flat or crystal pendants will please the gods and prevent you from getting sick.
Yes, perhaps both Homer (the author of the world-famous literary classic the Iliad and the Odyssey) and a hypothetical modern Homer (d'oh!) believed in a flat Earth. The modern Homer failed to understand or rejected the education he was offered, while a hypothetical modern observer, who feels more intelligent than the flat-earther, understood and accepted it. But that does not mean that the ancient Homer was of similar intelligence!
The difference between us and them is the accumulated knowledge. You and I had no better an idea of what a volcano is than an anyone from thousands of years ago until someone told us.
I think of certain types of knowledge as one way functions. In order to acquire the knowledge you have to search a huge key space or experience costly elimination of options. Once you know the answer it feels obvious and intuitive. We have accumulated so much of this knowledge now that we have a hard time intuitively understanding the gap between people without it and us.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
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For pyramids, I think modern thinkers underestimate power of a lot of people working together in harmony for long time.
It's like the theory of "they must have been slaves driven to work by their nobles!" When I believe it turned out they were just blue-collar Ancient Egyptian workers with families and paychecks who thought they'd be doing a good thing by honoring the Pharoah.
They weren’t subhuman slave class. But it’s far from clear they had economic agency.
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Someone I knew once questioned, after seeing it in person, how ancient Egyptian and Inca builders could have fit stones so well together and polished them so smoothly without advanced technology. I essentially said to him, “If I gave you two rocks and three weeks of nothing else to do, you’d have the faces of those rocks even smoother than those others”.