Discovering a New Neolithic World(archaeology.org)
archaeology.org
Discovering a New Neolithic World
https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2024/features/discovering-a-new-neolithic-world/
18 comments
It’s amazing that pottery is only 9000 years old or so. We are so young, ridiculously so on the timescale of the earth. Firing pottery to making semiconductor chips in the blink of an eye.
I read yesterday that the late British astronomer Patrick Moore shook hands with all of Orville Wright, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong. It is remarkable how quickly we went from rudimentary powered flight to the moon.
We don't have data points to make comparisons. What I think it shows is that once you have the technology and science to successfully build a plane then space is actually not a big step.
In science and technology things develop in many areas concurrently and at some point stars suddenly align and boom things happen extremely quickly.
It's a bit like small drones these days. They require small powerful motors, high energy density batteries, and integrated semiconductors. All those technologies developed independently and then as soon as they all became available, boom, drones everywhere.
In science and technology things develop in many areas concurrently and at some point stars suddenly align and boom things happen extremely quickly.
It's a bit like small drones these days. They require small powerful motors, high energy density batteries, and integrated semiconductors. All those technologies developed independently and then as soon as they all became available, boom, drones everywhere.
There's great articles out there that try to explain the innovations that unlocked rapid development; in the case of powered planes, it's a combination of aerodynamics (the wing shape), precise machining (engine) and materials science (weight, although the first plane was mostly wood and canvas). But also iterative design, the Wright brothers made a few gliders in the years leading up to the flight.
Likewise, we went from message and passenger service limited to the speed of a horse, to continent-spanning railroads and telegraph networks in one generation.
> It is remarkable how quickly we went from rudimentary powered flight to the moon.
I never got these kinds of statements. What on earth are you comparing us to? Somehow people who make the above statement never remark how slow it was moving from the development of agriculture to being sedentary, for instance.
I never got these kinds of statements. What on earth are you comparing us to? Somehow people who make the above statement never remark how slow it was moving from the development of agriculture to being sedentary, for instance.
Funny that you say what on Earth are you comparing us to. It's just that Earth, look at the time it takes for purely biological evolution to take place. Flight is estimated to have first evolved 350 million years ago in insects, then dinosaurs 220 million years ago, then birds, and bats 60 million years ago. From insects to bats is 290 million years. It took us less than 100 to go from basic flight to leaving the planet. On nearly any scale we humans have evolved and adapted on an unprecedented timescale. Hell, humans only evolved 100,000 years ago or so. It's a blink of the eye compared to literally everything else on our planet.
Seems like that's exactly the kind of implicit comparison being made. We went very quickly from early flight to rocketry relative to how quickly we went from early agriculture to complex agricultural societies.
That doesn't seem that interesting—of course people were more interested in living life than in technological advancement. The kind of industrial mania that produced our current society is something we can't exactly opt out of.
I'm pretty sure that people at all points in history have been interested in using technology to improve their lives.
There was a lively pre-pottery agricultural phase about 12000 years ago - they made pots and plates out of stone
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic
I can imagine people at the transition saying things like "They don't make plates like they used to. It used to take days of grinding real stone to make a bowl, but it lasted! Now they're making them out of dirt? And they break as soon as you drop them? What's the world coming to?"
Do I have evidence for this? No. But have people changed since then? Also no.
Do I have evidence for this? No. But have people changed since then? Also no.
While that quotation is funny, it is unlikely to be true, because the stories about its origin contain serious errors.
The two versions given there are contradictory: "unearthed not far from Babylon and dated back to 2800 B.C." can not be true together with "attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.".
Assyria was far from Babylon, far towards the North.
Moreover, neither Assyria nor Babylon were places of any importance around 2800 B.C.
At that early time, there were neither Babylonian nor Assyrian tablets, but only Sumerian tablets (or in the neighboring lands there were Proto-Elamite tablets).
Unlike the later Sumerian tablets, e.g. those after 2500 B.C., the tablets from around 2800 B.C. use an archaic variant of the cuneiform writing system which can be deciphered only with great uncertainties.
There is no doubt that it would have been impossible to deduce a coherent text like "The world must be coming to an end. Children no longer obey their parents and every man wants to write a book." from such an archaic tablet.
At most it could have been possible to identify a few known words among incomprehensible gibberish, e.g. "world ... end ... children ... obey ... parents ... man ... tablet". But even a so great number of recognizable words is unlikely to have been found.
Nevertheless, similar texts are quite common in the Mesopotamian literature, but they have been found on much more recent tablets, e.g. from one thousand years after the claimed "2800 B.C." date. Perhaps the date was quoted wrongly and the original claim was about a tablet from 2800 years before present, which could have easily been true about a Babylonian or Assyrian tablet with such a content.
The two versions given there are contradictory: "unearthed not far from Babylon and dated back to 2800 B.C." can not be true together with "attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.".
Assyria was far from Babylon, far towards the North.
Moreover, neither Assyria nor Babylon were places of any importance around 2800 B.C.
At that early time, there were neither Babylonian nor Assyrian tablets, but only Sumerian tablets (or in the neighboring lands there were Proto-Elamite tablets).
Unlike the later Sumerian tablets, e.g. those after 2500 B.C., the tablets from around 2800 B.C. use an archaic variant of the cuneiform writing system which can be deciphered only with great uncertainties.
There is no doubt that it would have been impossible to deduce a coherent text like "The world must be coming to an end. Children no longer obey their parents and every man wants to write a book." from such an archaic tablet.
At most it could have been possible to identify a few known words among incomprehensible gibberish, e.g. "world ... end ... children ... obey ... parents ... man ... tablet". But even a so great number of recognizable words is unlikely to have been found.
Nevertheless, similar texts are quite common in the Mesopotamian literature, but they have been found on much more recent tablets, e.g. from one thousand years after the claimed "2800 B.C." date. Perhaps the date was quoted wrongly and the original claim was about a tablet from 2800 years before present, which could have easily been true about a Babylonian or Assyrian tablet with such a content.
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings has a very fun description of a large document from ca. 2900 BC:
> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep.
> Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep.
> Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
What I find funny is that these kind of quotes are often used to mean that older generations will always criticize younger generations, no matter what. At the same time, those critics' civilizations all collapsed, sometimes catastrophically. Maybe these critics happen when a civilization ends. Maybe not.
A stone bowl will break when you drop it.
Ah well. I guess they'd have to come up with a different rationalization.