Human evolution = based on technology; what is our best or most fundamental one?

There's some debate as to the process of hominoid to homosapien and brain development evolution (brain stem -> reptilian brain -> limbic system -> cortex -> neo-cortex) which seem to largely define us now.

But it's essentially hypothesized that the first homosapiens came from south Africa about 300 thousands years ago.

There had been contentions of homosapien varieties previous to this, but owing to global events such as climate change etc., general thought seems to be there were physiologcal morphologies that basically rendered the version of humans you see now, at that 300 thousand year-ago mark.

i.e. since then, our actual physiology has not really evolved, progressed or changed, really at all as far as I understand.

These homosapiens traveled and populated the earth (I'm sure there are other learned posters can delineate this process with greater definition), but as I understand it population went into rise and decline, owing to another variety of global changes, the species diversified into various cultures and genetic patterns were altered in each division rendering differences in skin color etc.

.....

The point is, these relatively superficial differences aside, the basis of who we are as humans, physiologically, hasn't changed almost at all since that point in time 300 thousands years previous.

So what has changed?

How are we different and to what do we owe the revolution in standard of living we have now, to what it was then (life expectancy about 1/3rd of current expectancy, typically about 25% offspring survival rate, death/disease rampant etc)?

.....

Technology, obviously.

Many will (correctly) pont to the industrial revolution, iron ages, Roman age of water management, hygiene practices etc., causing dramatic leaps in civilization via their respective technological innovations.

Historical inventors such as Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, Michael Faraday - their contributions paving the way for the subsequent leap in electrification and associated benefits humanity currently has.

.....

A currently practicing computer scientist and roboticist recently made a contention however that, I think we so often overlook.

Cont.....

That computer scientist is a former Russian, currently based in Bosten MA lecturer at MIT by the name Lex Fridman.

And his contention was:

- Language

Written and spoken language, not historically considered to be, but in and of itself - one of the great human technologies.

Almost offering definition to who and what we are as people.

I could go on a generate a couple walls-of-text, but just to punctuate the contention, I will let "Ali G" (aka "Borat") share his perspectives through a founder of cognitive science, hailed as "the godfather of linguistics", Noam Chomsky.

https://youtu.be/fOIM1_xOSro

(relevant quotation is in first 30 seconds of interview).

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058213335/human-evolution-based-on-technology-what-is-our-best-or-most-fundamental-one

The subject of human evolution has long fascinated me JJ. The complexity within it is strong. The older idea of a kinda singular set of steps like this:

Just doesn't fit the evidence at all. It was a very messy set of branches, with a few offshoots that led to us.

There had been contentions of homosapien varieties previous to this, but owing to global events such as climate change etc., general thought seems to be there were physiologcal morphologies that basically rendered the version of humans you see now, at that 300 thousand year-ago mark.

i.e. since then, our actual physiology has not really evolved, progressed or changed, really at all as far as I understand.

Oh there have been many changes in the interim, physiologically and it strongly seems behaviourally too. For a start and like you noted there were other human (sub)species hanging around all over the old world. Never mind 300,000 years, go back 100,000 years and if you had a look at the different hominids on the planet you'd be taking a risky bet backing us in particular. There was little or no obvious differences in behaviour and physiologically we looked more alike than we look like us today. We were slightly more gracile, but only just. Not so long ago on the Wiki page about early Homo Sapiens one of the examples of a skull was actually a Neandertal and it wasn;t spotted for ages. That's how little many of the differences were. And they were very much outliers on the physiological front. There would be no human alive today that would have pretty much any of the suite of skull and skeletal features they had.

Something seems to have happened with us between around 90-50,000 years ago. Abstract thought the biggie. Now there had been some very rare examples of some sort of abstract thought before that date(EG a French cave where Neandertals had deliberately assembled a stalagmite "henge" of sorts 150,000 years ago), but they were vanishingly rare and actually even rarer with us(South Africans collecting and marking bits of ochre was about your lot). But in that 90-50K period that stuff really took off and by 40,000 years ago it was spreading*.

Physiologically we grew more gracile over time, smaller jaws, more flattened midfaces, flatter foreheads, smaller teeth. One interesting and pretty recent change is in our teeth and jaws. Modern humans today have an overbite, archaic humans(and archaic Sapiens) didn't. This helps us enunciate F sounds more easily. It may also help other areas of speech. In essence a Neandertal would sound a bit funny telling you to fúck off. 😁

Another aspect was when we went into those territories where previous humans lived we broke out the wine and netflix and chilled around the campfire and had kids with each other. Those genes are still in us today. If you're non African you have Neandertal genes, if you're Asian you have Neandertal(a different set) and Denisovan genes and the hint of another people. Africans have hints of their own archaic admixtures. These genes seem to have been selected for positively or they would likely have vanished by now. Though they have reduced over time. For example Otzi the Iceman has more Neandertal genes than modern peoples because he was closer to the event. A guy's skeleton they found in Siberia who was from 30 odd 1000 years ago had a Neandertal great grandfather. Another odd thing that happened to us around 30,000 years ago is we started to live longer, or more men and women made it to older ages. IE we went from dropping off the twig at around 35-40 to expiring more at around 55-60. Nobody knows why.

But these changes are in evidence in more recent times. Since the agricultural revolution in the late neolithic there have been a myriad of genetic changes in modern humans. The most obvious being food. Pre that time pretty much every human alive was lactose and gluten intolerant and alcohol would really screw with them. Give a caveman a buttered ham sandwich and a beer and he'd have the liquid sit downs for a week. 😁 There were also changes in areas like sperm production, though nobody knows why or what for.

TL;DR? we've actually changed quite a bit over the last 300,000 years and changed a lot in the last 60,000 and many of those changes happened within early historical periods.

*My personal hypothesis was that it arose as a competitive thing when modern humans moved into territories where existing archaic humans were living, as a way to mark out our group affiliation and culture in the new lands. I would say our increased gregariousness and larger groups was also a part of this. EG what's interesting in those early days of modern humans in Europe is that they appear to have the same cultural symbols across the continent. Cave art in Spain has the same symbolism as cave art in Germany. On the other hand Neandertals had very small family groups and what cultural items they had were very local.

Put it this way - again going on the assumption (observation) that physiologically we've remained consistent, and quality of life improvements are based on technology.

Then by default, harnessing that technology = first lesson on the first day of becoming a proficient, functional human, mmmkay?

.....

So, further on in life, we'll learn a job skill and apply that form of technology (IT coding is something that's massively prominent currently, as an example).

In society in general, we've recently learned how to use the piece of technology we characterize as "mobile phones" (what many of us now consider essential), a user friendly learning curve but again, it's technology and there's a (brief) element of establishing proficiency, with said technology.

So - what do we learn on the first lesson of the first day of human tuition?

.....

Language.

Potentially the most fundamental and necessary technology of an advanced and civilized society.

Why is this so important?

Because, as Chomsky outlines (cued by "Ali G"), it's the defining property of what makes us human.

....

It's how we think, how we rationalize, how we ultimately relate to other people;

Not only in terms of vocalized or written communication, but as our rationalization affects the outcome of our feelings toward another person - it implicates the "vibe" we give them (their subsequent intuitive perception/feeling of us toward them).

Therefore language itself can determine proficiency and functionality of our very nervous system itself.

Consider little kids, infants etc., still in the process of establishing language proficiency.

They're nuts.

Always screaming and going nuts and crying and throwing their toys out of the pram.

As they are in the process of language acquisition, their rationalization of their environment and their feelings is in a high state of flux (i.e. it's not really established) and therefore they're prone to impulsive erratic behavior.

As their language acquisition and rationalization improves (i.e. they become more cognizant), their behavior and associated functionality and situational management, also improves.

.....

However, in genetic conditions where they're non-verbal (such as non-verbal autism), and language acquisition and application (primarily in their own minds to rationalize their feelings and actions, not just verbal expression) is absent = this erratic and impulsive behavior does not subside.

i.e. they're genetically prohibited from establishing proficiency with the technology of language.

And that lack of impulse control is sustained.

.....

Point being, human evolution is based on technology and language is no exception (though historically it's not something we regard as a technology).

......

GoogleBot

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058213335/human-evolution-based-on-technology-what-is-our-best-or-most-fundamental-one

300k years ago? That's just a theory living millions of years on this planet people were travelling around the globe multiple directions. And saying people come from Africa just repeating someone bs.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118027740#Comment_118027740

Various incarnations of hominoids have been supposedly in existence for potentially millions of years.

Earliest skeletons of homo-sapiens were found in Africa 300 thousand years before, the hypothesis is called the "out of Africa" model and is the most widely accepted contention of modern human evolution.

Still an active area of research but point being - since this incarnation of hominoids, there has been essentially little to no physiological evolution.

i.e. all subsequent evolution is based on or through modern technology.

If a homosapien was transplanted from the plains of Africa 300k years ago into modern society and raised under our values, the contention is they would be indistinguishable from a bro or gal of this generation.

GoogleBot

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118027790#Comment_118027790

Agree.

Markcheese

I'm gonna say use of fire - its definitely one of our earliest technologies- and it may be one of the things that has allowed modern humans to develop -

Having fire MAY allowed us to not live in trees -

to not have thick hair all over our bodies allowing us to sweat more efficiently - and hunt better ..

To cook foods - allowing us to sustain bigger brains so ultimately language...

And probably loads of other stuff I haven't thought of ..

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118027740#Comment_118027740

It's far more than a hypothesis, the evidence is extremely strong for it. While there were admixtures along the way with archaic hominids living outside of Africa which added to the Modern Human genome, the vast bulk of our genome is indeed African(north east African to narrow it down).

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118027790#Comment_118027790

Still an active area of research but point being - since this incarnation of hominoids, there has been essentially little to no physiological evolution.

No. This is incorrect. There have been many many changes at the genetic and physiological level. This is a Sapiens skull from Israel at 100,000 years ago:

This is a modern human skull(cast):

While the Levant skull has the distinctive globular shape of modern human lines, it is less globular, significantly more robust, the forehead remains low, the brow ridges extremely strong, the chin barely present, the nose less defined. Going back to your date of 300,000 years and this skull of early Sapiens from Morocco the differences are even more stark:

There isn't a human being alive today that would fit these measurements. The features that strongly suggest these are on the lines of our ancestors are things like a flatter face around the midface, more rounded brain case(more a soccer ball than a a rugby ball) without an occipital bun and an early hint of a chin. Other than that the changes have been significant as we continued to evolve.

And that's just in the bones. Our behaviour was no different to other archaic hominids, or the differences appear to have been minimal. We used the same tools and lived in similar environments for many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. That changed and changed in a big way within the last 100,000 years, especially in the last 60,000. There was a massive change in tool production and variety within a remarkably short period of time. Then there are the massive shifts in widespread cultural expressions.

As you theorise OP, human language is the basis of absolutely everything and furthering of our civilisation. Language is communication at a sophisticated level, and is evolving in semantic complexity if not always syntactic complexity. In fact languages tend to simplify in grammatical structure as more subtlety of meaning behind words & phrases continues to evolve. Our technological advances are achieved through communication, and computer programming and markup languages themselves were developed from human spoken language. So yes, OP’s belief is entirely valid IMO.

Shao Kahn

If technology is our great evolutionary "rabbit from hat" contribution, then it's a bit depressing in some respects tbh.

We have people who have almost entirely stopped communicating to other people, and mostly communicate with devices now. You could argue therefore, that some people are best friends with their phone - because that's what they spend most of their time interacting with. That's not really evolution in my book.

What is evolution anyway? Does it imply that we are advancing in all measurable areas to some degree, compared with where our ancestors were?

We've obviously advanced very impressively in many areas. But what does it mean overall, if we are actually going backwards in some areas as a direct consequence? Can this still be deemed progress overall?

If there is a yin ~ yang element to this evolution process, how do we decide what is more important? And what aspects of our lives to abandon while we drive for this progress in other areas? For example, are we okay with our bodies getting weaker as our brains grow more powerful over time? As it appears that there is evidence of this occurring throughout human evolution.

Wibbs

If a homosapien was transplanted from the plains of Africa 300k years ago into modern society and raised under our values, the contention is they would be indistinguishable from a bro or gal of this generation.

We can't say that with confidence either. A wolf skull and skeleton looks very much like a robust German Shepherd dog skull and skeleton yet their behaviours are quite different and while you could bring a wolf puppy into your house and it would be sort of alright(if madly destructive and food guarding) by the time it matured you really couldn't.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118027952#Comment_118027952

Fire was a big game changer alright and for the reasons you give. Interestingly even after we mastered fire there were periods of time where later hominids seem to have gone without it for periods of time

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118028088#Comment_118028088

Language is huge alright. Though I would suggest it's again more complex than that. Humans like Neandertals have the same anatomy to produce speech so almost certainly talked to each other. It's likely language itself has been around for hundreds of thousands of years in some form. Two things seem to have changed. Firstly we started to get abstract in our thinking within the last 100,000 years(though there are earlier hints of it). This would have massively impacted language. Something like basic tenses are quite abstract. It's possible a human of any form 150,000 years ago might not have an idea of past, present and future in their lexicon. That could have in play even more recently. Take this panel of horses in the Chauvet cave in france. Some of the earliest figurative paintings on earth.

They were painted over each other over a period of a thousand years. That's a staggering continuity to us in our fast paced world. What's also interesting about such art is that when this stuff was first discovered it was naturally assumed the more sophisticated and naturalistic work was more recent, but it turns out not to be the case. We stared painting the sophisticated and naturalistic work first. One researcher in another discipline noticed that many kids with autism start out drawing sophisticated and naturalistic work which has impressed many down the years, but as their language skills improve with age they usually revert to drawing like other kids their age, less "sophisticated and naturalistic", but that approach has a sophistication in the abstract that is actually deeper. So maybe the early painters hadn't fully developed modern language yet?

Secondly, though to be fair this is more of my take on things: Networking. Consider the home computer. Around in numbers since the late 70's really getting popular in the 80's. They could do all sorts of things, play games, type letters etc, but their impact was actually minimal in the grand scheme of things. Then came the internet. Quite rapidly those same home computers gave rise to a gamechanger in world history and they didn't really have to become any brighter to do it. Your average person that uses the internet could get away with a low spec computer to do most of what they currently do.

Now translate that to the human story. Neandertals were not thick. On average they had larger brains than humans today. At different times in their history they showed abstract thought and evolution, but it seems it died on the vine. They seem to have been like wolves, small genetically narrow family "packs" presiding over territories. Then we come along. We don't appear to be any cleverer at first, but we did have one difference; much larger affiliated groups and more interaction between them. They were like 80's PC's, we had the internet. This makes a huge difference. If Ug the Neandertal was a genius and came up with a great new spear, his family would benefit from it, but that idea would likely die with him and his group. Ug the Sapiens on the other hand; if he had a great new spear idea, that idea was far more likely to travel among the much larger Sapiens social network and become the new improved spear for all Sapiens. Within a generation or so that idea could travel across an area the size of Europe, which in turn would get other Ugs and Ugesses coming up with improvements that would travel back across the same network. And we can see this in the archaeology.

GoogleBot

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118028039#Comment_118028039

If few skulls found in Africa is not a benchmark for all human species at the time. Many live in North pole before and after the earth spin and with ice age some migrate to south hence evidence we come from Africa is incomplete in my opinion.

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118029804#Comment_118029804

Actually GB I would 100% agree with you that a few skulls are not representative. Too often that has been the case in the field. Researchers keen to make a name for themselves find a skull and too often claim it's a new species. There's a site in present day Georgia where they found a load of Homo Erectus(likely teh first hominid to leave Africa) bones all from around the same time. The most striking thing is how different each one of the skulls looks. Now they do share a suite of features that says "Erectus" but they had quite the variability, just like we do. Neandertals have very distinctive features too. Modern humans today are very much the outliers compared to all other previous humans. We are very much the odd man out in how we look. In many ways we look like juveniles compared to the rest of previous humans.

Basically the picture is currently this. Hominids evolved in Africa, then one, Erectus got the wanderlust and boy did they wander. They were like gap year New Zealanders on Columbian marching powder. They walked into Europe as far north as Britain, Asia all the way to the Pacific, where they hung around for hundreds of thousands of years, lasting in the case of the dwarf Hobbits of Flores island into or close to historic times. These were the people that first mastered fire and developed more complex tools. They kept evolving in their various places, into(very roughly) Erectus 2.0, Neandertals in Europe, Denisovans in the Asia and then early modern Humans in Africa. The ones in Africa, Erectus 2.1 had a siimilar wanderlust to their forebears and went on a big walk, first across Africa and then across the old world, as far as Australia which oddly Erectus never got, that we know of. Yet(I suspect they did), met locals along the way and got jiggy with them and after some back and forth gave rise to us today, outcompeting the other Erectus 2.0. After a while they in turn evolved into Erectus 2.5; Us.

If you look at modern people's anatomy, we look "African". In the sense that we look adapted to warmer climes. Taller and thinner, more gracile(Maccy Dee addicts aside 😁) with a smaller skin surface area. Compared to the cold adapted Neandertals who were slightly shorter, very much broader, huge lungs, no waist, massive nostrils and sinuses, with short stout limbs and significantly higher muscle mass. In computer simulations of the force they could wield they were scarily strong compared to us. If you put our own Conor McGregor at his best(which was bloody impressive) in a ring with an 18 year old Neandertal lass he'd be in trouble, an 18 year old Neandertal lad would throw him around like a ragdoll. These were people who took down wild horses, deer and aurochs in close quarter ambush hunting. Aurochs were a now sadly extinct type of cow/cattle(they lasted into the 17th century 😥). Think of the biggest angriest bull you can think of who mated with satan. And the Terminator.

Oh and before the innovation of fitted clothing, humans avoided the cold north. Neandertals who were about the most cold adapted peoples and were leather workers so had some protection, stayed in the colder but not ice bound regions below the ice sheets of the various ice ages and moved back and forth with the movement of that ice. Think living in the forests of modern central Europe rather than Eskimo living on ice. Well in a continental ice age food is hard to come by in the ice(Inuit folks exploited the abundant food in the seas) and it's estimated they needed around 3000 to 4000 calories a day just to keep themselves alive because of all that lean tissue. One of our advantages is that we didn't and could put away more fat stores. We could weather the lean periods more easily than them. Pretty much every Neandertal person we've looked went gone through periods of famine as shown by lines in their teeth. So if you do find yourself looking down at a bit of a paunch, rejoice that it's one of the things that made us who we are today.

GoogleBot

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118030603#Comment_118030603

You have good skill if you write a book I would love to read. I think all human species were experience hunger in the past and only with industrial revolution and new technologies in food production we have tons of unhealthy but totally satisfiyng food 24/7

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118028198#Comment_118028198

It seems like we're communicating less, directly through verbal contact?

Perhaps, but some jokers used to talk diabolical nonsense.

Another interview with Chomsky he explains how verbal communication is really only a side purpose of language.

It's genuine purpose is our own internal rationalization (cognition), how we make sense of the environment around us and personally deduce how and what to do, and when.

i.e. it's behavioural implications.

This is the primary purpose of language, why as above, in cases like non-verbal autism, its absence is so devastating.

.....

Besides which, before a single word is ever spoken directly, we communicate far more so through intuitive perception of other people.

That is to say, their "vibe", and their vibe will be a function of their feelings as a function of the quality of their own internal rationale, which has been conducted through....... language.

https://youtu.be/cC1HszE5Hcw?t=2722

Thread should have been titled, "language is our most fundamental technology", cause that's what I was aiming to address.

Time stamped, view point on language - "there's a way of being captured by a language" = it's what defines us.

Conflates with Chomsky's contention.

Wibbs

First one would have to include langauge as a technology. I wouldn't. Secondly it's how we define language that's also important. Hominids have had the physiology to produce complex sounds for hundreds of thousands of years. It's highly likely they had language as part of their suite of killer apps. However it's the type of language that's important. One thing humans have is abstraction. That's the game changer and it seems it came late to the party, or was present in tiny isolated ways beforehand. You could have a complex language rooted in hard reality with no abstractions. A language that would allow for the transmission of complexity, even emotional states to a large degree, but only to a point.

What we're doing here right now is based on and utterly reliant upon abstraction. You are looking at a bunch of lines and sqiggles and understanding that layer of abstraction and turning it into thoughts and vice versa. If I draw a pictagram of a house that's a layer of abstraction you'd have to understand, if I write "house" that's another even more complex layer on top. It's quite possible that if you showed a drawing of a horse to a human of 200,000 years ago they'd be at a loss, if you then wrote "horse" they'd be completely adrift at the very concept of that. Even though they otherwise could have a very complex everyday language that allowed them to navigate their environment and pass that on to the next generation. There was a group of people(IIRC in the mountains of Turkey) whose culture had no images of things in it. When they were shown images of things like horses and the like they couldn't quite make sense of it. And these were of course fully modern humans. The history of colours and words for them illustrates this too. Cultures who don't have a word for blue in their language can't see blue, but a different green(blue comes very late to the language rainbow). "Pink" and "orange" a few centuries ago were both "red". Here's a Robin Red Breast

they were named before orange became a colour. Indeed in the medieval and later European folklore around them they were said to have been stained by the blood of Christ on the cross as they tried in vain to pluck the nails from his hands. To the same medieval mind that had no word for orange they "saw" the above as blood red.

Take walking into a shop and buying a carton of milk(an abstraction in of itself). You hand over a piece of paper that's worthless in reality. Its only actual worth is the mutually agreed abstraction that it is of an exchangeable value(paying by card or phone ditto). Even that has specifities. If I walk into a shop in Canada to buy milk and hand them a 10 euro note, the mutual agreement vanishes regarding the same sheet of "worthless" paper because it's a slightly different abstraction.

TL;DR? Abstraction is one of our most fundamental leaps as a species, one that impacted pretty much everything and especially language. Without it we wouldn't have art, science, religions, philosophy, writing, commerce. Language was one of its vehicles.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118196221#Comment_118196221

lol, sorry matey, I just can't take seriously the opinion of someone who still resides on their parents property and has never had an encounter with a member of the opposite gender (they're not related to).

For that reason,

No offence bud.

Wibbs

Feck it, engaging with the idiotic is a thankless task.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118199073#Comment_118199073

I agree.

Make life easy for yourself and stick to engaging with the other virgins at the model toy shop.

Ten of Swords

Well this has been fun

Closed

@JohnJoeJames take a day away from After Hours