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by remarkEon 6 days ago
Sorry, you're claiming that people who lived in a desolate tundra 40k years ago are the same as you and me.

Can you be more specific? There's both a hardware and firmware element to this. Perhaps the hardware element is transferable.

1 comments

The fondamental thing here is that humans 40k years ago could live in the toundra because we can live in the toundra today, and they had a similar behaviour to ours. So they made clothes and fires for the cold, and weapons for hunting the local fauna, just like we do. And they avoided actually desolate areas because they could not live without food.

That's why the colonisation of colder areas happened at about the time of behavioural modernity. Before that, humans where anatomically modern (mostly identical to us) but did not have the cultural equipment to deal with difficult environments.

>because we can live in the toundra today

No we can't. Have you been the tundra? You can't survive there on your own without technology. These people could.

Nope, they couldn't, they also required tech.

  Archaeologists find blade tools in the Caucasus from 300,000 years ago, and blades and awls were made in Southern Africa during a very cold phase 75,000 years ago.

  Northern China had blade tools from 40,000 years ago, bone awls from 35,000 years ago and eyed needles from 30,000 years ago.

  In Europe, eyed needles accompanied Homo sapiens toward the coldest part of the last glacial cycle, the last glacial maximum, around 22,000 years ago.
~ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-cloth...

~ https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ancient-needles-awls-survival-...