[thewebguyd]

There's a ton of people that, for some reason, just can't grok that humans have been largely behaviorally and biologically identical for the past 200k years.

The average ancient roman plebeian's life would not look dramatically different from ours today, minus technology of course. They worked a day job, ate at thermopoliums (basically fast food), lived in crowded apartment complexes with various forms of slum lords, deal with high rent prices, and roman graffiti is littered with complaints about politicians, sports teams, and the rising cost of living.

With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri, a detailed logistics logbook documenting the teams moving the stones for the great pyramids, along side payroll records much like any other spreadsheet you'll find on someone's corporate computer today.

We are not so different from our ancient ancestors at all.

[ManuelKiessling]

It has always been my understanding that if talking about homo sapiens sapiens: then if you could „snatch“ a newborn from 200k years ago and raise it just like any other human baby today, there is nothing in terms of biology etc. that would stop said baby from becoming an engineer, astronaut, formula one race driver, lawyer, programmer, or CEO (or any other modern profession for that matter).

Never read up if that pet theory of mine has any merit, though.

[limbicsystem]

I used to think that as well. This book recently made me think again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10,000_Year_Explosion

[SequoiaHope]

There’s some adaptations to disease etc but basically my understanding is that this is true.

[aqfamnzc]

A couple years ago I realized that I had somewhat subconsciously made the same assumption. The thing that snapped me out of it was my awe in watching Clickspring (YT) try to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism. That device's complexity and craftsmanship is proof to me that despite the lack of technology, there were some astonishingly smart and resourceful people living thousands of years ago.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Maybe they learned from the aliens?

[Gibbon1]

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple.

The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.

[cassepipe]

A thing of note, the Nile banks have been one the most fertile arable land around the whole mediterranean, that's why it was invaluable to the roman empire. Why it matters is that only in a place where you have very fertile land can you afford to have sooooo many people not working in agriculture and feed them to work for your tyrannical pet project

[pyuser583]

There’s one in London too.

[consumer451]

There is even a controversial theory that individual human intelligence peaked around 3000 years ago.

> Crabtree bases his argument on the fact that, for more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities, which has led to big-brained humans. Since the development of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effectively stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical intelligence genes.

https://wcuquad.com/101393/news/humans-are-no-longer-as-inte...

[lqstuart]

I think the gap here variation. Yes, people living 50,000 years ago were likely quite similar to _some_ people alive today, just probably not very similar to the types of people who are able to peacefully sit around on the internet and read history books for pleasure, who would most likely ask that question.

[comrade1234]

There are ideas that ancient human thinking was very different and primitive compared to modern. For example (and others): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes (1976)

[seanclayton]

In the half century that has passed since the publishing of that book, plenty of work has been done to say that ancient human thinking wasn't primitive, especially the ones that made the pyramids 4,600 years ago, such as the Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Mark Lehner and Pierre Tallet (2022) which alludes to the minds of competent and intelligent humans

[jleyank]

Comparing Plato to various current-day companies and governments, this is true. Assuming "primitive" means "clear or unobscured".

[crooked-v]

That one is an interesting scifi premise, but deeply unpersuasive when it comes to actual humans.

[Hikikomori]

It was one of the main influences for the cyberpunk Snow Crash novel.

[shawn_w]

And an even bigger influence in Stephenson's first book, The Big U.

[applfanboysbgon]

In much the same way there are 'ideas' that aliens built pyramids.

[effed3]

probably this is an effect of a much more simple environment and tasks in the past: Sleep, hunt and not been hunted, eat, reproduce. the minds seems simpler, but is apparent.

We live in a more complex world, this produce someting more complex, culture, ideas, knowledge, tasks, technology, craps.. but basic intelligence i think is the same (if not better in the past, less "pollution")

[kbelder]

If I was to sum up Jaynes' most relevant idea, I'd say it is that language is a technological advancement that evolved to handle more abstract and powerful concepts over time. Ten thousand years ago, humans were biologically the same as today, but their tool of language wasn't advanced enough to effectively communicate or contemplate some concepts, and it led to a reduced inner monologue and explicit self-awareness.

When I first read it, I remember thinking that this was the most interesting book I've read that is probably wrong.

[effed3]

I don't have read jaines. To me the language was different yes, but the mind is another thing, but the two are cleary related. I think humans need (and create) more concepts, more complex/different idea, to grasp/describe a more complex world around, but the mind is equally capable now as 50k-years ago.

Probably in the past minds can contemplate things we are not more aware today, who know? is not all about rational and scientific thinking, is not more or less advanced, is simply different, and in the past humans needed a quite different set of ideas and tools than today.

Just travel to Papua-NewGuinea and check with some tribe in a lost valley, straigh from Neolythic, some does not have a concept of "3", but children can learn arithmetic as everyone else, they can contemplate every concept we have, given the right path.

[pseudohadamard]

> With the pyramids, we have the Wadi al-Jarf papyri

Yeah but that was planted by the aliens, who got the idea from God when she was planting all the dinosaur fossils in 4,004 BC.

[card_zero]

Romans, huh? Many of them were slaves, they believed they could learn the future by looking at the patterns of birds in flight, a Roman's bloodline was very important to the Roman's importance. You can take "behaviorally identical" too far, ideas got better over time, people in the past had bad ideas.

[NikolaNovak]

If that's sarcastic, good one :)

If genuine, I'm puzzled. In the current world we have a tremendous amount of people who hold various superstitious beliefs as well as spend tremendous amount of time on their genealogy. And nepotism never went away. I agree those are "bad ideas", but don't see how they differentiate us from people 5k years ago?

[card_zero]

I guess I got downvoted for not supplying very persuasive examples. The point is, cleverness is having good ideas-about-ideas, and these have obviously improved over time, so people in the past were obviously not so clever.

I could point at all the self-help books that promise to improve the way you think, or Wikipedias list of fallacies, but I don't those are great examples either. It's frustrating that I can't make a simple point just because it needs more research. I hoped people would find better examples themselves.

I don't think your word "tremendous" works, I think superstition declined and values improved, but it's hard to nail this down for people who are keen to disagree. Does that include you? Why?

[thewebguyd]

Still sounds a lot like humans today. Many are still slaves, many believe they can learn the future by reading cards with funny pictures on them, for some bloodline is very important, as is race.

I don't think we are meaningfully different at all. The same types and groups of people and social structures all still exist today. I suppose the big difference is those of us who are well adjusted know that racism is not good, and tarot cards are meaningless woo woo. But there were also such skeptics back then too.

[card_zero]

I don't understand the downvote, it's like "nooo, their ideas were exactly as good as the ones we have today, humans don't learn over time, how dare you imply we used to be stupider, it's sacrilege".

So I object to this weird article of faith every time it comes up, we can't have been exactly as sensible and exactly as clever in the past as we are today, it doesn't make any sense to say that. But it's somehow become right-on to say that it's so, as if denying it is a prejudice like timeism or something. It obviously matters to some world view, equality maybe?

[NikolaNovak]

We have access to different data points today. But the way I read the original post is that human mind as such did not meaningful change. If you took a Roman or Egyptian embryo from 5k years ago and incubated it today, you'd have a modern human. The fact that many people back then had crazy ideas, is orthogonal to the biological argument at hand - and that's before we look at amount of people with crazy ideas today, many of which are largely the same.

Basically I think we have to pick a lane on whether we are talking biology, vs culture, vs knowledge and accumulated data.

[card_zero]

Yes, but I don't know why we'd be talking about biology in the first place, unless everybody's going around assessing everybody else a biologically stupid or smart. (If so, where do they think the smart ones get their good ideas from, are those ideas supposed to be inborn? Or exuded from a strong and genetically healthy idea-gland?)

[thewebguyd]

I didn't downvote you.

But, I'm not saying that humans haven't learned anything, but that cognitively we haven't changed. A roman citizen has the exact same brain capacity to reason and adapt as we do today. There is zero separation from ancient human vs. modern human in that aspect.

You are conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence. That roman looking at bird entrails to predict the future was using the exact same pattern-recognition ability we use today to look at data visualizations, or trend graphs.

You could go back in time, steal an ancient roman baby, and raise them in today's year and they would be no different from you or I.

[bjt]

I agree with the "steal an ancient roman baby" premise. The "roman citizen" example is not as strong. Cognitive ability is not just genetics. The grown-up roman would be missing a lot of advantages during their upbringing that weren't available back then. Also, limiting it to just "citizens" means limiting it to their upper class.

Compared to Roman times, we've had pretty big advances in nutrition, healthcare, education, and widespread middle class wealth. It's not unreasonable to infer that these would have an impact on cognitive ability similar to the effect they've had on life expectancy.

That being said, there's definitely a present-ist bias, as the McSweeney's article does a good job mocking. I do believe their best thinkers were as good as our best thinkers.

[constantius]

Life expectancy didn't change that much, what changed is infant mortality.

And for cognitive ability: plenty of firsthand accounts from Enlightenment thinkers about thesuperior reasoning abilities of average members of hunter-gatherer/American Indian tribes compared to the typical European at the time, and they arguably already had better access to nutrition/education/healthcare.

Cognitive ability is for sure related to some extent to these factors, but actual practice of reasoning (through public debates, leisure time, storytelling) seems to have been much more influential on the actual realisation of cognitive potential, and I'm not sure there'd be a stark difference between a typical human today, or even a typical Westerner, vs a typical Roman citizen.

[card_zero]

Well no, not even as good. For instance, your comment invokes the idea of prejudice, and the value of being unprejudiced. Did Romans know about that, and consider it important? Maybe, I couldn't say offhand, but my point is that they might not have had some valuable idea like that. I think we can say with certainty that they must have lacked some idea of great value to thinking. That makes the ancients all worse at thinking, all of them. This doesn't of course mean that their best ideas were bad though!

[jleyank]

Same religions. Same political structures. Same engineering - we've only recently duplicated their concrete, and man, could they build roads and aqueducts. Yeah, they had a dodgy number system, but they had military and political organizations that lasted 1000+ years. They had worldwide trade, and unified far more territory than anybody today.

[card_zero]

Yes, of course that's right. But I thought you were the one conflating collective knowledge with individual human intelligence, when you said "behaviorally". Behaviors being due to ideas, not nature (I don't much rate nature's effect on smarts anyway).

Maybe I need to spell this distinction out next time it comes up, which will be the next ancient history thread, probably. I guess the endless repetition of "they were just as smart as we were you know!" is in order to counteract an unstated idea that the ancients were some other species, like orangutans in bronze armor, I don't know. Maybe it's common to vaguely think that about them? But this gratuitous counter-point should be on a strictly genetic basis, or else you'd be accidentally denying that ideas improve.

[effed3]

is not too difficult to find "very bad ideas" today, just look around. The point is about knowledge and culture, not individuals