How stupid were our ancestors?

Stiffler2 wrote: »

The question is are we really as smart as we think we are.
Our ancestors knew how to work the land and appreciate nature and work with it.

We destroy everthing and move on and soon earth will be destroyed because of this

Eh not quite. Modern humans came out of Africa and spread throughout the world and you can track them by animal extinctions and environmental change as they go. Then we came up with farming and this really took off.

We just love the notion of the noble savage in Europe. Have done for many centuries. Today it's just gussied up in more PC environmental tones. Hunter gatherers, those that people reckon are "in touch with nature etc" can be just as destructive as people living in the modern world. It's just not as obvious. Take New Zealand and the Maori. New Zealand was one of the last large places on earth humans got to. Not so long ago either. When the Normans came here, NZ was still uninhabited. it was around 1300 before he first humans made it. They found an isolated land of diverse wildlife, found nowhere else(especially birds). Their population was quite small for a long time, but even so they wiped out all the moa bird species and many others. NZ had been covered with forest when they arrived, but by the time Europeans show up over half had been cleared by burning.

Look at another environment in microcosm; Easter island. Again a place quite recently colonised. It was covered in forest and many animals etc. By the time Europeans arrived it was a treeless largely barren landscape with a tiny population. They had destroyed their environment to the point where their very existence was threatened.

Stiffler2 wrote: »

Grand point but I was talking about ancestors from 10,000 years ago like the OP said, not the last 2 thousand years.

The examples I gave would be the same type of culture of the ones 10,000 years ago. Hunter gatherers and fishermen with a side order of subsistence farming. A culture with deep roots in our history. Many such cultures survive down to this day.

OK go back 10,000 years. Hell lets rev up the Tardis and go back even further 50-60,000 years and look at Australia. It was a very different land back then. We humans show up and again major extinctions occur and large scale burning of forest to drive prey animals out. The ultimate "noble savage" to the hippie European mind is often the Australian Aborigine, with their dreamtime and respect for the land. All good, but in many ways they were forced to start respecting the land as they had such an impact on it early on that they would have died out in the harsher environment they were left with. Look to the Americas. Again when the first humans show up animals start disappearing.

Basically one of the major markers of modern humans is our impact on the environments we move into and we have been doing this for the last 80,000 years(at least) since we became fully modern. By contrast our close cousins the Neandertals existed in Eurasia for well over 200,000 years and had little impact on the local environment by comparison. No local extinctions and the like.

xflyer wrote: »

There could be a major reset sometime in the future. Back to a time when it's survival of the fittest again. Not a pleasant prospect.

It depends on what we define as fittest though too. Without the many thousands of stereotypical asthmatic nerds out there that wouldn't last pissing time in the stone age I wouldn't be typing this. Even so in the stone age "unfit" people were often valued if the evidence is anything to go by. Neandertals were tough fcukers. They'd make a cage fighter look like 7 stone weakling, yet they looked after the less fit among their group. One guy died at a very old age(may have been into his 60's). He had a withered arm lost in youth at the elbow, he was crippled with arthritis and hadn't a tooth in his head for at least 5-10 years(which meant someone would have had to chew his food for him). He was considered valuable to his people, though would have been as much practical use as a chocolate teapot for most of his life. One defining thing about humans is how far we'll go to to ensure the survival of the "unfittest".