Could persent day humanity survive 2 million years ago?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Back to disease.

Modern contagious diseases will disappear. Viruses and bacteria are living organisms, they need a favorable ecology to survive and spread. And a very small group of 2000 people just isn’t enough. How many people when the sample is taken will be contagious for mumps? How many for measles? How many for whooping cough? How many for smallpox? How many for tuberculosis? How many for cholera? How many for HIV?

The likelihood for almost all these diseases is zero. No carriers at all. The vast majority of infectious diseases won’t be able to make the jump with the new population. But some will. The common cold. Probably HIV, there’s likely to be at least a few HIV positive people. But even the common cold is likely to go extinct in a few years with such a small population. Cold viruses have to maintain a continuous resivoir of infected people. And each infected person has to infect at least one more person before their immune system fights the virus to a standstill. But as the virus is hopping from person to person it’s also mutating…so by the time it makes it back to a previously infected person it has mutated so much that the previously infected person’s immune system doesn’t recognize it any more.

But in a small population there won’t be time enough for the virus to mutate enough to infect previously infected people. The cold virus goes through the population, everyone gets the cold eventually…and then the virus has no one left to infect. Everyone’s immune to that strain. And the likelihood of another virus switching species to humans is very low, because the vast majority of new flu strains come from humans who work in close proximity to domestic animals. There won’t be any domestic animals.

HIV is a little trickier, since infected people don’t usually die very soon. But…HIV positive colonists aren’t going to have any more antiviral drugs. Pretty soon, within a few years, they’re all going to get sick and die. And the prospects for anonymous sexual transmission will be gone. Yes, people will have sex, but you’re not going to be cheating on your wife with a flight attendant, you’re not going to have any bathhouses. So either HIV will go extinct in a few years, when the last HIV positive colonist dies, or everyone will get HIV.

Now, of course the colonists are going to be hunter gatherers. And of course H/G only supports low population densities. Except this is only 2000 people! In preglacial europe! Yes, they’re not all going to live in one village. But they certainly can all live within a week’s walk from each other.

If you can avoid starving and freezing to death the first year, there’s an excellent chance you can survive indefinately. There might be a steep die off the first year…but if you can learn to hunt enough to survive that first year you’re just going to get better and better at it. And if you have a decent enough shelter to avoid hypothermia the first year, the next year you can improve it. Hunter gatherers don’t live on the ragged edge of starvation year after year like subsistance farmers do. The colonists aren’t going to be hunting mammoths, they’re going to be hunting squirrels and rabbits…animals you can kill with a thrown rock or a sharp stick. Or gaffing fish, or collecting shellfish, or turning over rocks and eating the wiggly critters.

However, there’s not going to any domestication projects. Not enough time, not enough people for specialization. And there aren’t likely to be many children for the second generation. And it’s going to be hugely difficult even to pass on basic literacy to the second generation. I’m sure there will be a huge push to teach the kids to read and write and fear about knowlege being lost forever. But how hard is the second generation going to work to teach the third generation? I’m sure they’ll try…but reading and writing will be irrelevant to their day to day lives as hunters and gatherers. Kids today grow up surrounded by writing, there are thousands of books available. What are the second and third generation kids going to read? A few tattered skins their parents copied down from memory. How much time are the parents going to spend writing books on perishable animal skins? How many of those skins are going to survive? I suppose clay tablets could last longer…but how do you teach the kids that those clay tablets are important, when they so obviously AREN’T? Sure, write down the quadratic equation, write down a mathematics primer. But almost no one will understand what it was supposed to be FOR once the last colonist dies.

So there’s not going to be any rebuilding of civilization until population densities grow, cities develop, agriculture is needed again, etc. But literacy is bound to be lost within a few generations, and so all teaching must be done through the oral tradition. And there’s not much that can be explained that way. I suppose teaching the kids about evolution, where humans come from, that the earth is really really old and such could be useful…but those beliefs are bound to be garbled without literacy.

62

Can I trade my gun for a set of Foxfire books instead?

63

You’d capture some babies after killing & eating mom, and keep them in astrong pen, feeding them, then eating them. They’d hardly be pets.

True, HG does require a small pop density- which with 2000 dudes in all of Europe is what you have. America likely started with around 2000 migrants, and it took 100 centuries to make HG unworkable and it still worked in some areas, with sporadic agriculture more common than organized cities in most of the Americas. And, oddly, selective brreding of native species up to more or less modern common foodstuffs was accomplished in less time than that, with no one really having any knowledge of scientific selective breeding.

I agree with Lemur866 in that passing along of modern knowledge will be difficult past Gen4. I expect that unless dudes were very lucky, modern scientific knowledge would just be superstition by Gen 10, and we’d be lucky if some could still read the clay tablets. But unless they was a huge social problem with Gen1, there’d be no problem with the decendents propagating themselves, and basicly re-inventing most of everything. They’d have the time to re-invent agriculture and breed modern crops and animal species- just as our ancestors really did.

The question is- how much of a boost would the few steel tools and modern scientific knowledge get our descendents along? I suspect a whole bunch- by generation 10, they’d be “back” to about what the late Paleolithic people were (in other words, some metals, basic agriculture and animal husbandry, baskets, pottery, and so forth) but getting to that took a couple million years in RL. In other words, we’d get a nearly a 2 million year “jump” in forming Civilization. Before the Ice Age, we’d have Global Warming! :smiley:

64

Heh. People’s religious beliefs come through sooner or later. :smiley: For a mighty long time, such knowledge is going to be utterly irrelevant; just as Sherlock Holmes considered knowing whether the Sun went around the Earth or vice versa completely unimportant.

Passing on knowledge about the inclined plane, the lever and the wheel, Pythagoras’s Theorem, and above all the scientific method… they’d matter a lot more than getting in the definitive last word on the creationism/evolutionism debate. Knowing that animals and plants can be bred for desired traits, yes, maybe (but that’s going to be a generations-long project after the essentials have been managed); knowing that the Earth is three or five billion years old, eh, not so much.

65

Well, I suppose trying to seed the future generation’s religion with correct information could backfire anyway. When future proto-scientists find that everything they discover is supported by scripture, they might just quit doing science and become full time mystics.

Back to the survival arguments, well, 2000 people is a lot of people. Some of them would survive, and some of those survivors would have children. Any children born would neccesarily be born to those people who could adapt to the changed environment. Even if the third generation is only 100 people that third generation is going to be fully acculturated hunter-gatherers…with no neighbors and living in one of the richest environments in the world. Modern hunter-gatherers tend to live in marginal lands because agriculturalists with specialist warriors displaced them from the most fertile areas. Those 100 third generation survivors would have a population explosion akin to Clovis hunters entering the Americas…a few thousand years to colonize all of Europe, Asia and Africa. Probably they’ll eventually wipe out the Australopithecus populations from Africa, and there goes our timeline.

66

I think that unless you’re already back to (at the very least) agriculture, bronze tools, and labour specialization including career scholars/scribes before the initial 2000 die off, you’re not going to have enough intergenerational data transmission to get there at all. That is, if it’s still all H-G when the last of the initial group dies, it’ll be H-G for thousands more years, until the descendents repopulate Europe and the population density in the Fertile Crescent rises high enough to re-invent agriculture. Assuming that the descendents survive, that is. There’s just no way to transmit our modern knowledge base in an H-G setting.

67

Actually, the problem would be that none of the diseases are optimized for humans. When a species is introduced to a novel virus, the morbidity and mortality rates are much, much higher than when the disease has become endemic. It’s when the diseases have become “optimized” for humans that they are less dangerous. Take a look at one of the strains of Ebola for instance. You can bet that whatever reservoir species it lives with, it doesn’t tear through that population at 80-90% fatality rates (Marburg kills at that rate even among those who are hospitalized soon after infection). If you were lucky, the sampling of humans would still carry some resistance to those ancient diseases and enough of them would survive to support a decent population level. Check out The Coming Plague and Virus X for information on what emerging diseases that haven’t had time to co-evolve with humans are like when they’re introduced into a population.

Der Trihs, you’ve got a very skewed view of low-tech life. You should probably read some anthropological texts. Any written in the last 15-20 years will tell you that, while hunting and gathering isn’t all fun and games, there’s very good evidence that the onset of what we call civilization had a hugely negative impact for literally thousands of years. It wasn’t until very modern times that humans reached the same level of affluence and general health as most hunting and gathering people, and we still don’t have the same level of egalitarianism.

Oh, and guys, the oft-quoted life expectancy figure in the 30s is not really accurate. There are some significant problems with estimating past life expectancy from only remains. Higher infant mortality pushes the average down, but with modern hunters and gatherers an average of between 5-10% of the living population is older than 60, which is not too shabby considering that the percentage of the US population 65 or older is 12.5% according to the CIA World Factbook. The impact of outsiders on HG life expectancy has usually been negative – any possible medical help or food doesn’t make up for the increased rates of disease and other problems from the outside – to neutral, so the numbers of old people may actually have been a bit higher in the past. Researchers have already had to revise assumptions about life expectancy with present-day HG people.

In my mind, kicking off at 45-50 from a hunting accident is far preferable to getting cancer, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, or any of the other fun medical problems you are much more prone to when you’re 60+ anyway. Hunting and gathering oldsters tend to be at least as mobile as people of the same age from first world cultures and have an overall level of health higher than all third-world nations. Their diet is actually better than that of most first-world poor and their health rivals that of that population too.

That said, there’s no way given the starting conditions that any colony would be able to reach our present level of tech in any less than several hundred to a few thousand years, even assuming constant and accurate knowledge transmission and a drive to reach that goal. Sure, given the knowledge, there are some technologies that can be bootstrapped, but any level of tech higher than iron age stuff takes skills and support that will be entirely absent until some kind of infrastructure exists.

That infrastructure will take generations to set up, and in the meantime, there are easier ways to live. Of course, considering that the most experienced woodsman is probably the equivalent of a slightly dumb 12 year old from a traditional culture when it comes to real old-style survival with no outside support or supplies, it’s going to be a real chore to keep people alive for the first few years and to accumulate knowledge of the area and the skills needed to exploit local resources effectively. Once you get that start, life will start to get easier and the next generation won’t have too much of a problem staying alive.

Unfortunately, I doubt you’d be able to convince the grandkids that farming is the way to go when you have to work so damn hard for your food compared to hunting and gathering. The adoption of agriculture likely took generations of incremental progress and cultural change. That can’t be created overnight, no matter how dedicated your people are or how effectively they pass that drive on. Give them seed stock, and you might, I repeat, might be able to start farming and keep farming. That will give a few thousand year head start to your hypothetical colony of time travelers.

Of course, any problems with the first harvest or two and all your people will die or have to change to another kind of lifestyle. There’s no one else to trade with, or even be enslaved by, in this setup. It would be a real gamble to start farming right away with no fallback plan, and that fallback plan is likely to include the abandonment of the initial goals in lieu of survival.

68

I’ve heard the idea that “hunter-gatherers are happier” repeated a few times on this board recently. I realise its backed up by some sort of studies, and may even be true (although if someone could point me the way of said studies I’d be grateful), but what about healthier? Surely farming insures a better food supply, more consistently throughout the year (it must have done, if converting from HG to farming was forced by population growth). Sure, hunter-gatherers might enjoy themselves during the summer, but in winter won’t the farmers have much more food, much more shelter, and less to do?

69

No, farmers don’t have more reliable food, since they are dependent on one or two plant species for the majority of their calories. If the rice/wheat/corn harvest is smaller than usual, you begin starving. Farming takes a lot more work to provide the same calories, the advantage of farming is that those calories can come from a much smaller land area. But the disadvantage is that a farmer has sunk a lot of labor into his farm and can’t just abandon it when the neighbors get grumpy, so subsistence farming leads to the feudal system.

Of course, if your grain harvest is small, you could just go out into the forest and gather more intensively to make up the difference. Trouble is that there won’t be much forest or wild land nearby, because it is all converted to farms. However, that won’t be the case for the colonists, any farmstead is going to have plenty of wild land to supplement the farm. But that farm won’t be worth much in the first place because the colonists won’t have any worthwhile seed stock.

70

Ah, thanks. I’m just an idiot. :smack:

71

Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. The title refers to the development of agriculture, and I think Diamond’s opinion of it is pretty clear from that.

This is an essay that was presented in the late 60s to start changing attitudes that were prevalent at the time, that hunting and gathering was a bad way to live. In the 40 years since, Sahlins’ theories have been generally confirmed.

Though it has no good links and definitely no footnotes, this page has a decent overview of hunting and gathering.

Something to remember is that modern studies of hunter-gatherer societies like the !Kung are living on land that is so inhospitable that no one else wants it. That, along with outside influence, makes it hard to be really sure what life was like for ancient HGs. Another issue is that, no matter how many benefits there might have been in living like that, it’s completely unworkable now. Only semi-wackos like Anarcho-Primitivists think we can turn back the clock.

About 99% of the world’s societies are not HGs anymore and there’s no way any substantial population would be able to return to that lifestyle. The population densities were much lower and we’ve lost almost all of the knowledge we’d need anyway. If we get hit by a rock that almost-but-not-quite wipes out humanity, any possible survivors would probably be HGs for millennia afterward, but something almost of that magnitude would probably be required to return us to that lifestyle.

Besides, I really like computers and the associated tech :slight_smile:

72

What a crock, it’s not like you could go back in time and convince the one guy not to try primative agriculture, it was, no doubt in my opinion, spontainiously created by many people over a long time. And why was this done, because it seemed like a good idea! Why did it stick? Because it worked! Things got better for more people than it was before. I’d love to see Jared Diamond chuck his royalties and house and laptop and live off the land. Hell, he could probubly afford to buy a big enough stretch of someplace and live the life of a hunter-gatherer. I won’t hold my breath waiting.

73

Well, presumably the switch from HG to farming can only be counted as a temporary “mistake”, since you can’t support the population densities you need for urban centres on HG, and the majority of technological innovation over the past few millenia has come almost exclusively from the cities. Plus, of course, modern agricultural techniques (which I realise are not universally practised) make farming a much less labour intensive and risky job than when the switch first began. I would imagine that the good Proffessor is not really in favour of chaning history, since, while it might make the bulk of humanity happier for a few thousand years, it would mean that the technology required to bring about internet message boards, computers or Professors of Anthropology would never come about.

74

Didn’t we agree that the real mistake was coming down from the trees in the first place?

75

From our point of view in our culture, most people of course think that we’ve got the best way of doing things. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the best way, just that we think it’s the best way. You take it for granted that certain things are “necessary.” Why do we need cities? Why do we need better technology? Why do we need better farming techniques?

Agriculture initially spread partially because farmers like to increase yields, which means they have a need for more land, which cuts into others’ use of land, which eventually leads to confrontations and warfare. The one main benefit of agriculture is people — lots of them. That means you can have armies and large-scale warfare, and with specialization you can have people whose jobs are to go out and kill people so that the farmers can take their land. Now this is enormously simplified, but agriculture succeeded in part because it fostered a lifestyle that encouraged and rewarded violence.

If you read my cites above, you would see that things didn’t get better for them for a long, long time. Famine, disease, and hard work were the rewards for switching to agriculture. It led to a need to be more competitive than your neighbors, to out-produce, out-breed, and outfight them. Things didn’t get better, they got worse and paradoxically that was what encouraged the spread of that way of life.

Yes, at this point going back would entail a huge amount of turmoil and the destruction of most of the current world population. That’s not something anyone wants to do. The people who wrote these articles know that. They know that there’s no turning back time, they know that even if they wanted to, that we’ve simply lost too much knowledge and that they personally don’t have the skills to live as hunter-gatherers, any more than a !Kung could toss aside his bow and earn a living as an Anthropology professor tomorrow. Dismissing their work and ideas just because they don’t live the HG lifestyle is more than a bit unreasonable.

By most objective measures, the only benefits we’ve gotten from the ca. 10,000 year experiment with agriculture are some really cool toys. We’re not substantially healthier, we don’t work less, we’re not free of hunger and hardship, we’re not more egalitarian, we don’t report higher levels of happiness than the few fading remnants of the hunting and gathering way of life, despite the fact that those who are left live in areas that are so marginal that no one else wants them.

Is the world a paradise because of our vaunted high technology? No, instead we’ve screwed up a great deal of it with that technology, and we don’t even have a whole lot to show for it. We’re caught in a constant race for improvement in farming because if we don’t we’ve got a Malthusian dieoff waiting for us, and even then we’ve got huge amounts of people starving all over the world because the food doesn’t get to them or they can’t pay for the food even if it’s there.

I’m not saying that I want to live as a hunter-gatherer — if that would even be possible anymore — I like high technology, but that doesn’t mean I can’t criticize the lifestyle we’ve had to adopt to get those things. It doesn’t look like that great of a bargain in some ways to me. Maybe you like the way the world is though.

76

[QUOTE=Sleel]
From our point of view in our culture, most people of course think that we’ve got the best way of doing things. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the best way, just that we think it’s the best way. You take it for granted that certain things are “necessary.” Why do we need cities? Why do we need better technology? Why do we need better farming techniques?..QUOTE]
No offense meant, Sleel, but it just sounds like Rouseau’s “noble savage” idealism all over again with the trappings of ‘anthro-babble’.

77

I really don’t think you know as much about people as you think you do. My guess would be that women today are pretty mkuch the same as women have been for the entire history of our species, and would want to have children in such a situation.

78

Just adding that the other advantage of farming is that the calories can be stored and transported much easier. So while the surplus calories produced per person might be less with farming, you can support more specialists, because the hunter/gatherers have no way of giving their surplus to anyone besides the 30 people in their band.

In other words, you can’t have civilization based on hunting/gathering. Whether civilization is a good thing is of course open for some debate as has been noted.
As far as taking 2,000 people and creating a functioning literate society? I say with 2-3 years of rations, plenty of seedstock and tools, a location with easily accessible iron ore, coal and indigenous game and serious discipline/organization/motivation among the group it’s still chancy. Anything less and you’re talking stone tools and legends of magical ancestors at best if you’re very lucky.

79

[QUOTE=BMalion]

No, Rousseau’s idea was something quite different. I’m not making any claims about the essential nature of the people, I’m saying that the way of life is beneficial. Hunter-gatherers are not peaceful by nature, nor are they free from selfishness, they’re people and that means that they’ve got the full complement of vices and virtues. Agriculture encourages violence because it creates better conditions for it. Expansionism, greater susceptibility to periodic famine, endemic disease, stratification of society, a dedicated warrior class, and the tools to make killing easier are all associated with agriculture and are all things which contribute to greater cultural violence. There’s no difference in the people, but there is in the way they live.

Try reading the cites. You don’t have to take my word for it, there’s lots of current info out there.

It’s not idealism, it’s the realization that the old view of hunting and gathering as a precarious and hard way of life was complete crap. These ideas were controversial in Sahlins’ time, but then people started looking at the data instead of letting their preconceptions lead them to disregard it, and there was enough confirmation there to gain respect. Now it’s pretty much the standard. Even discarding the findings in the field of anthropology there are studies on diet, metabolism, and child development into what constitutes healthy living. Those studies often provide independent confirmation that a hunting and gathering way of life would actually be ideal and that our current one is . . . not so much. No surprise, considering that humans have had that lifestyle for millions of years.

If you want to see some cultural preconceptions at work, search this board for the thread discussing wearing shoes in the house or not. Even within our own culture there are some pretty big dividing gaps. People take it for granted that of course everyone should live like they do and they sometimes get pretty emotional about it when someone says differently. Culture quite often gets in the way of objectivity when it comes to evaluating how someone lives.

80

[QUOTE=Sleel]

I read the cites, I’ve read Jared Diamond’s books, lots of books about ancient history as well. Civilization has it’s faults, true, but I think it’s virtues are worth it. Let’s face it, if we never got beyond the HG phase, we’d not even be having this conversation via the written word. There’d be no universities, hospitals, theatre, no major league baseball parks!

For all the criticism of any aspect of civilization and it’s evils, I’ve not seen many critics give it all up and live the life of a hunter gatherer.

I agree. The old view was quite arrogant.

Healthy living, strong bones and teeth, ability to know which plants treat which ailment are all well and good. But there’s more to it than that. there’s history, and learning, and imagining totally different world systems and actually making small steps to reach other planets!

I participated in that thread, it seemed more light hearted than you are remembering. I have my opinions, but I don’t try to tell people what to do in their own homes.