May 15, 2013
-
Be Honest: Would YOU have figured this stuff out?
Every time I read on Wiki “…was known in antiquity; the Egyptians used the dried seeds of this plant to cure ‘al hadrakeef’, known today as meningitus.”
Or “records of the planet Saturn’s 139.67 year orbital period have been found incised into excavated ground sloth femurs from ca. 9500 years before the present.” I wonder about the question in the title.
Tonight I noticed Jupiter, bright in the Western sky. And yeah, it’s not where it ‘belongs’. I mean, where I left it last time I looked, about a month ago. Most of the rest of the stars seem to stay put. Oh, except for that pesky bright-as-hell Morning star… and its dead-ringer twin, the Evening star.
The big question here is: would I have, could I have, put two and two together all by myself, thousands of years ago. (that’s before Google and high-speed internet, by the way.) {deduced that they are planets, not stars}
So here’s a list of other discoveries/realizations you may want to use to test your deductive prowess against pre-literate cave-persons of either gender:
1) FIRE Ok, fire occurred naturally on occasion from primordial times. Must have seemed like apocalyptic magic to our ancestors millions of years ago. And I’m assuming char-broiled steaks kinda just happened as a lucky accident. But the fire kept going out, overnight. Could well be that entire populations of Neanderthals froze to death waiting for the next benevolent lightning strike. And though it sounds simple in the Boy Scout manual, making a bow/string, spinning a dowel in a hole in a piece of dry wood with appropriately dry tinder? Yeah, I woulda froze, bottom line; how about you?
2) Agriculture/seed planting. This one I’m pretty sure I woulda figured out. You dropped some beans on the front lawn of your cave, a week later you see them sprouting and it’s the very same plant you remember you got the beans from. So you do it again and damn, it works! No more hunting/gathering for this wunder-kind…
3) The finite speed of light: Ok, a bit of a fast-forward but a perfect example of the role of step-by-step yet un-directed technology in becoming Smart like Us. The telescope (of course after the invention of glass, duh,) followed by careful timing of the ocultations of Jupiter’s satellites. This of course after we realized that the planets orbit the Sun, and not the reverse. And sadly, I wouldn’t have figured that one out. I’m down with Ptolemy, (and probably also the flat-earth common-sense theory too. Seriously, I woulda spent my whole life dead-certain that ‘There they be Dragons!’. Ships appear lower in the water as they receed into the distance because… I don’t know, maybe they leak?
4) Sickness, disease, and monstrous deformities:
I have these four orphaned kitties some scoundrel threw on my lawn a month ago. about two weeks old with eyes pasted shut, I of course knew that they were afflicted with the endemic feline herpes virus. I’ve now fed them continually, around the clock. Materna ™ from an eyedropper. 30 days X 4 babies X 6 feedings a day X 5 ‘hits’ a feeding = some ungodly number of acts of mercy. Sadly, one died a week ago. Lost her appetite, her primal spark, and just quietly gave up the ghost, as they say. Sad. But as a pre-modern human, to what would I have attributed her particular demise? Vile ‘humours’ from the night air, the Evil Eye, Karma, Mercury retro-grade at the hour of her birth?
Look, our modern understanding of cause and effect, in this case a malevolent virus small enough to put billions on a pinhead, is built on so damn many incremental discoveries, fine-tuned in fits and starts. And these days all only a click away on the net.
And it’s only every so often that I ask myself: “How much of this treasure-trove of knowledge could I have mined and smelted all by my lonesome?” Not much, I have to admit. We do stand on the shoulders of giants
That’s the thought for today, my friends.
(I haven’t posted here in a coon’s age; a good dozen entries await my release from kitty-motherhood. Yup, as soon as I get ‘em all accepted at prestige colleges, I’ll be back just like always./JS
Comments (30)
I think about this too. I also wonder how humans discovered which foods were safe to eat and which were poisonous. Fire, no. Agriculture, probably would have stumbled upon it and then given up. Wouldn’t have thought much about light or stars. Disease, I probably also wouldn’t have thought much about it or differentiated it from any other horrendous misfortune I’d encounter.
If I did my math right, that’s about 3600 hits of kitty drops.
@tjordanm - I imagine there was a lot of trial and error. Looked at what the other animals ate, watched other people eat and see if they dropped dead from it.
You deserve a Happy belated Mother’s Day wish. You are a good man who discovered kitties in need. You have a heart and don’t need Google to tell you that, either. <3
@tjordanm - i guess people individually discovered what was critical for their particular niche. i do remember my Dad deciding one night to explain/prove that the earth rotates. We laid out on a concrete slab and ‘felt’ the world spinning. Um, kinda
@chronic_masticator - My fear is that I probably would have been to one to ‘save’ future generations by eating belladonna or jimson weed and proving their toxicity to my peers, ha
@sleekpunk - Thanks, dear. yes, an onus, a chore, has turned out to be almost a blessing. To look into their trusting little eyes… It brings back my fond memories with equally small humanoids.
Oy, they’re crying again right now. Little ingrates(!)
Fire – I visualize homo erectus striking, say, basalt against sandstone for a thousand years, then marble against granite for a thousand years, and so on. Eventually they would get it.
Nowadays we have Wikipedia, but what good does it do? Half the people still believe the earth is 6000 years old.
I’m sort of leaning toward an intervention to kick start the human race. Some say aliens, others God, I think it must have been one very smart cookie. Hope your kitties are thriving!
Hmmm… most of that stuff would have eluded me, but plant medicine I would have figured out or died trying. That’s kinda how I got my start at it, way back when I was but a wee one. Some unknowable part of my psych(e|o) has somehow just known which plants wanted to be left alone. Darned if I know how that works, but I’m glad it has so far.
It’s been said that I would have made a good caveman, but I’m not so sure it was compliment.
I’m guessing the early folks learned a lot through trial by error, particularly with planting and preparing food.
No idea how much I’d have been able to figure out in their shoes…er…barefeet?
I am sorry you lost a little kitty. Hope the others survive. They have to with the kind of nursing you are giving them.
I have wondered about the things that you have brought out here. Just wondered. Never put them in word. It takes a man of guts to bring them out on paper, oops, I mean screen.
If those biblical genealogies are accurate, ancient ancestors lived for hundreds of years and had lots of time to figure things out. I suspect 300-900 years of vigor and experimentation would lead to a lot of knowledge.
Adam and Eve had a jump start on agriculture, but if people started from scratch, they would have noticed that animals ate certain fruits and leaves and didn’t die. Once animals were domesticated, their owners might have noticed them eating specific plants when they were under the weather.
Things like seeing sparks fly when one hard rock strikes another could lead to quantum leaps of knowledge. I picture a caveman with Einstein hair doing hundreds of experiments trying to trap sparks and finally coming up with an effective tinder.
Imagine the guy who discovered a broken chunk of obsidian and cut his finger on an edge.
The dude who was always last in line during jungle hunting forays and got hit in the face by the branches released by the guys in front: “That piece of fruit just went flying past my ear! I wonder if we could harness that power.”
I heard a lecture about how people used to go to bed early and sleep on the roof if it was hot. Without light pollution, they had a spectacular view of the stars, and they watched them and named them and told stories about them and were much more familiar with them than we are.
Chinese mythology says that there was a man with a transparent stomach so that he could see what reaction to herbs happened to his body.
Kittens who get hit by viruses will turn blind. I suppose not being able to find food means it is a death sentence too.
There is a team of scientists trying hard to prove how smart the Neathandrals were. It is not easy to prove they buried their dead or that they threw the dead into a pit.
if the world isn’t flat then why are we always searching the four corners of it =/ I might have been suspicious about the stars and planets and I’d like to think I would have gotten the fire and gardening part…if you get cold and hungry enough wouldn’t cause and effect have kicked in? Dang – I think I was a Buddhist =| Thanks for mothering the kittens, your a good person, I don’t care what anyone else says =)))))
Fire: I picture Prometheus saying “Totally worth it” as he’s chained to the rock, but as the eagle wheeled in the sky above him he said “Aw shit, maybe not.”
Fire makes heat, friction makes heat, enough heat makes fire. Early peoples were just as smart and observant as we are, they just didn’t have the benefit of thousands of years of accumulated information.
As for primitive peoples’ having folk cures for illnesses, I’m sure for every one real cure there are a dozen useless fake cures. But people again were smart and would notice things like chewing bark from a willow tree made their pain go away (where we get asperin from).
my best friend’s mom makes $75 hourly on the internet. She has been laid off for 9 months but last month her payment was $21867 just working on the internet for a few hours. Read more on this site http://www.rev24.com
Several years ago my husband got an idea to invent and build a microtonal keyboard instrument (actually with buttons) that would take advantage of all the various cents that go unused in our modern scales and modes. He envisioned a U-shaped console, something like on a pipe organ, with rows upon rows of buttons. He even got an accordionist friend to commit to learning how to play this thing should it ever be built. Alas, as he was researching for possible interested parties online, he discovered that someone had already beat him to it and built a similar instrument. That was the end of his bid for a research grant. It just goes to show: if you have a great idea, chances are someone else already had it.
Good luck with the kittens. I’m sorry you lost one.
@elgan - That’s an interesting story, El. Yes, my tendency lately is to assume ‘somebody already thought of it’. T’was easier before the net spoiled everything; I had two fairly innovative prototypes of musical devices, just never thought much about patenting them.
@agnophilo - ”…Early peoples were just as smart and observant as we are”, yes, that’s the key to having a decent respect for the brutes, ha. Lots of folks kinda assume that ‘primitives’ were sorta ‘retarded’.
@Roadkill_Spatula - Lot’s of interesting thoughts on this, Tim. I do precisely ‘go to sleep early and look at the stars a lot’, lately. That’s mainly what inspired the post.
And maybe the dream I had once of a party with all the 18 generations of Solbergs I have names and birth-date/place for. We’d have a lot to talk about, but the evolution of language would be quite apparent.
@elgan - And inversely if you have a really dumb idea a million other people probably already had it.
Nevertheless your husband sounds like a cool dude.
@jsolberg - Big difference between ignorance and stupidity. Besides, put any latte’ drinking modern human in the jungle and see how well they do. They had to have as much memory and common sense as we do in the modern world, they had no books or wikipedia or google to keep track of what foods were good to eat and what foods were poisonous, or what animals and insects were dangerous or how to hunt or preserve food or a hundred other things. Everything was passed on orally, including their history, mythology etc – if anything they may have needed bigger brains than us.
@we_deny_everything - Ha, good point. You can lead a sheep to perfect info/water, but damn, they refuse to drink it up. Guess we’re lucky the young-earthers do spend most of their hours inside their trailer homes.
@murisopsis - There *are* parallels in individual life; the moment we finally figure something out and then no longer make the same mistake again, ever.
@Typically_Misunderstood - Thanks for the impulse to read up on the legend I always ‘sorta knew’. And I haven’t felt particularly promethean for some time now. Anything I could steal from the gods would merit maybe a sparrow pissing on my foot once a week, nothing more.
@firetyger - ha, me neither. guess it’s impossible to really test the question; to roll back the knowledge base 10,000 years and see how I do.
@jsolberg -
lol
I always wondered how the women of eld figured out how to weave clothes on those loony loomies.
Just to let you know I stop by again and awhile. Oh, and to the knowledge thingie – farm kids have an advantage, trust me on this:
Fire, tough but unnecessary until alt-Lars grew weary of his yuppie neighbors constantly mowing the lawn – so Lars, a bit nerdy but observant as voyeurs must be, determined he could create blaze as long as he could get his hands on a glowing ember. It took a year and 28 days to identify the right dirt and develop his terra cotta fire pot, but once done alt-Lars moved to the edge of the glacier where he knew cocaine-addled-social-climbers would not follow. When the glacier moved south, alt-Lars licensed his fire, terra cotta and fire pot patents to every cave-lord and moved to Miami.
Seeds – easy peasy. Notice that trees grow where squirrels and birds drop seeds. Realize you would have more time to drink your beer if you could plant barley in the yard and did not have to travel 1,000 miles to harvest it.
Finite Speed of Light: Speed relative to where, Al? If light from the true center of the Universe approaches a 1972 Triumph Trident at the speed of light and one turns said 1972 Triumph Trident directly into the wave of light particles and accelerates to 130 mph (at which point Lucas lord of darkness will certainly cause ignition circuits to fail), doesn’t the speed of light, relative to said 1972 Triumph Trident change to light-speed plus 130 mph (until, of course, the trickstery of Lucas brings said Triumph Trident to a stop)? Time travel, Free Will and listening to Santana while experiencing hashish nirvana strongly suggestthe speed of light is finite only to the family situation from which she flees and most certainly variable to the dysfunctional arrangement into which she plunges.
Sickness, disease and monstrous deformities (and contagion). Judging from the number of sickos hacking phlegm at various space/time coordinates of the cubical farm, 99% of people still do not get this one.
cp
@chromepoet - I so much love your exhaustive contributions to the theme here. As luck has it, even this one is now ‘saved’ in my archives. Make sure you do you own best to save your work here, it’s free and easy. the link is in the latest? Xanga Team announcement.
I do have some of your verse, not all, saved. You have few, if any, rivals, as Shirley you must know/ do keep my solberg73 at Google adresss in your files, although I believe you do have it/ JS