More and more news articles are pushing homo sapien’s existence further and further back in time. And it can be easily demonstrated that our advancement in the past 75-150 years are following a geometric (if not logarithmic) progression.
So how did we live for thousands to millions of years and only relatively recently start this huge advancement in nearly all areas of knowledge?
Our progression is certainly not logarithmic, which is a very slow progression. It’s exponential, or (to use a synonym), geometric. And the reason that it’s only been so fast recently is that it’s always been exponential. That’s the nature of an exponential curve: No matter where you are on the graph, you will always see a huge increase right at the end, with a nearly-flat part stretching back from that to the dawn of time.
You sometimes hear people talking about the coming “singularity”, about thirty years hence, when technological advancement will be so fast that it’ll result in a world incomprehensible to the people of today. But what a lot of folks don’t realize is that the “singularity” (which really should instead be called a “horizon”) is always about thirty years in the future, and always has been. From the point of view of someone from thirty years ago, we right now are at the “singularity”. And from the point of view of someone living in 1870, 1900 was the “singularity”, and so on.
No wonder old people get crotchety.
But this totally makes sense to me. Think of what advances we’ve had since 1987. I remember things that were science fiction back then (video phones, talking on a watch, computer in your pocket, virtual reality) being something I use every day.
Look up Emergenceas a property. (The Wiki article is just a convenient starting point.)
From a sufficient starting point, complex notions form and if acted upon produce even more complex reactions. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution provided the philosophical and technological base to get what we would today call progress snowballing. It was like coming up with a Lego set for the first time and giving it to all the most creative people in the world. They took each other’s completed constructs and combined them into huger ones.
Why did the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution happen only a few hundred years ago rather than earlier? That’s harder to answer. People had bits and pieces but never quite enough to snowball. The why is buried deep in the history of the world’s ancient cultures. A lot of history comes down to, it just happened that way. I think this does as well.
Chronos You’re right, and I suck at math. 
I was thinking a logarithmic scale being used to show large increase over time.
But we’re advancing faster in IT, EE, Healthcare (STEM, CRISPR), Manufacturing, there’s more happening faster than ever has. Sure, you have things like the Industrial Revolution, but that’s, chronologically speaking, just a few minutes ago.
We went millions to hundreds of thousands of years as nomads, then several thousands of years as farmers with an emerging stationary cultural development, to inventing things like plumbing, steam power, Internal combustion, at a rate that’s hard to fathom (from powered glider in 1912 to landing on the moon in 1969 to reusable rockets in 2015)
We’ve developed in big jumps, not nothing like the rate we’re doing so now.
The neolithic revolution was a prerequisite for the rapid advances in science and technology. And that revolution required a particular combination of climate and habitat.
You have to go back to 120,000 BC to find Earth as warm as it was in the early Holocene. So OP’s question becomes Why was there no neolithic revolution 120,000 years ago? But at that time, H.sapiens was in competition with other hominids. IIRC, it is often thought that some key H. sapiens mutations (e.g. for language skills) occurred after that date.
According to current theories I’ve read: There’s a “bottleneck” in human populations about 70,000 years ago. At that time, there was a population of Homo Sapiens Sapiens that numbered a few thousand. From there, they spread and overwhelmed most other hominids (i.e. Neaderthal, Denisovian) and expanded across much of the world to the tip of South America in about 60,000 years. The question is, what was it about a small group that gave them such powerful abilities to expand and thrive everywhere, forcing out previous humans? One theory is the emergence of complete language; another suggestion is the emergence of a brain capable of abstract planning. Either one gives the tribe the ability to plan and execute, for example, complicated hunting plans, and to pass knowledge to younger members more efficiently. Before that, for the last million years or so, hominids had slowly spread from Africa in waves and inhabited much of Eurasia.
The other question I have is that somewhere between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago humans developed agriculture. Meanwhile, about 4,000 years ago they did the exact same half a world away in America with no clue what the Mesopotamians and Chinese had done. Why? What made people who were just fine without agriculture from 70,000BC to 10,000BC suddenly discover that plants could be grown from seed, en masse, and provide a more stable food source?
There’s a very important thing that needs to be at least recognized in this discussion:
philosophical point of view.
The more I’ve looked into our history, the more aware I have become, that “progress” is a point of view issue, and is actually being fought over rather constantly.
In addition, HUMAN progress, that is, the development of humans as creatures, is entirely distinct from TECHNOLOGICAL progress. It is actually NOT KNOWN whether or not there has been any significant change in humans as a reasoning creature, over the very great deal of time that it took to go from pointed sticks to iphones.
In addition, TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE, needs to be looked at a LOT more carefully, if you want to discuss it in this particular context. And more than one facet of it needs to be noted. Most people probably realize on some level, that technological advances are interdependent. Even if the first caveman imagined being able to sit on a mechanical vehicle and travel, he wouldn’t have been able to even BEGIN to follow through on such, until thousands of other problems and inventions were developed first. That’s fairly obvious. What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that once an advance DOES occur, human society is often irrevocably changed by it, and not always for the best.
By the way, my very simple answer to the title question is:
No we don’t know “what happened to man,” and further, chances are, NOTHING did. I believe we are as we were ten thousand, even a hundred thousand years ago. I know for sure, that there have been no changes in “man,” in all of recorded history. And all that we have discovered through archaeological research of the times before that, strongly suggests that there were no significant changes for a VERY long time before we started incessantly writing things down.
Flowers in the graves of Neanderthals, prove that.
I am neither an anthropologist nor a historian nor a scientist, but if I had to guess, I would say climate change. Either something changed that made hunting/gathering less of a reliable means of acquiring food, or something changed that made agriculture easier.
Probably, a lot of accidents happened. Penicillin was an accident, but after it, deliberate antibiotics followed. Microwave ovens were the result of an accident, but the technology that led to them led to a lot of other things as well. The domestication of the dog was probably an accident, or at least, something dogs partly chose themselves, but it might have been the accident that led to the domestication of other species for food or work.
“Flowers on the grave,” for all we know, led to farming. In other words, plant offerings left on a grave might have led to seedlings popping up, and that may have led to someone getting the idea that, hey, we can make plants grow where we want, so we don’t have to walk so far to get food.
It wasn’t until just a couple thousand years ago that people tried to deliberately turn up knowledge, and it was only a few hundred years ago that we had universities to set up facilities to discover new knowledge.
Every discovery leads to more discoveries. If you looked at things we have now, like the space shuttle, cell towers, the ability to make a sterile environment, or create a blastocyst in a petri dish, and we trace all the discoveries that were necessary, we’d probably find that there were key discoveries that were necessary for almost every advanced technology. And not just because they built society, but in a B follows A way.
Anyway, technology owes a lot to happenstance-- more, I think than we realize. Almost as much as life itself does.
I think that’s too strong a statement: there are certainly some evolutionary changes in humans over the last 10,000 years, let alone the past 100,000. We’re healthier, taller, prettier, and, yes, a little smarter.
One amusing thing is that our skulls have thinner bones than in times past: we kill enough of each other with guns and swords, and fewer of each other with clubs, so as to have made thick skulls less of a benefit.
I wonder if the invention of writing has had a similar effect on our memories?
Our more gracile skeletons predate the iron age, so you’re not seeing an adaptation to “guns and swords”.
The stock answer is “climate change”, but even with climate change and ice ages, there were areas of the inhabited world before that as were just as fertile and capable of growing plants as was the case in 10,000BC.
The only thing I can think of that made a difference would be population density. That, and possibly fishing (and good boats) made it possible for a tribe to linger in an area long enough to watch the life cycle and then encourage plants to grow to completion.
Flowers (actually pollen, as no flowers have been found) in Neanderthal graves don’t “prove” anything. We have some hypothesis, but we really don’t know what they signify.
Also, we know that lactose tolerance is a relatively recent mutation in certain human populations, probably appearing in the last 10,000 years or so, around the time of livestock domestication and spreading through farming communities. Immunity to certain diseases is also a relatively recent occurrence in certain populations, as the Native Americans were to find out, to their detriment, in very recent historical times.
It is also thought that the physical traits we associate with the various races arose within the last ~20k years, but certainly were not present 100k years ago.
Quoting from Scientific American. They said the trend was visible in the last 2,000 years.
The descendants of the first inhabitants of America look very much like their Siberian/Mongolian ancestral stock; Australians aboriginals look every much like the original Africans (we presume). Perhaps the melanin-challenged Europeans are a recent mutation; blonde and redhead even more recent.
We don’t really have immunity to certain diseases. Simple exposure creates long-term immunity in all humans, it’s a feature of our common immune systems. What native Americans lacked was exposure. The records of the last great epidemic of smallpox in the Pacific northwest shows the main problem - nobody had immunity, whole villages got sick at once. Thus, there was nobody to feed or give water to the feverish, and most of the village died of exposure and dehydration while incapacitated, not from fever toxins. Missionary records indicate where the locals had help (missionaries, a few locals who had been exposed to the disease before and were immune) the death rate was much lower; with proper care, mortality from smallpox itself was no more than with Europeans, about 10%.
We can see this also in the recurring bouts of bubonic plague. The first wave in 1348 killed somewhere around a third of the population in Europe. Every generation or two, sufficient numbers grew up without exposure to the tipping point where an outbreak spread rapidly; only to die out until the next time. Presumably there was a selection process for the disease itself, too - each wave less lethal, as the infection opportunities were greater for the germs that did not kill their victims too fast.
What Asians and Europeans had was domestic animals that incubated unique diseases that native Americans did not encounter.
There are some similarities, but so what? They split off from their Asian roots relatively recently.
Who presumes that? There are populations that can be found in South Asia (like the Andaman Islanders) that look superficially like Africans, but an Australian Aboriginal does not look like an African, nor is there any reason to think they look like Africans looked 60k or 100k years ago. They have lived and adapted to life in Australia for tens of thousand of years.
We don’t know for sure what we looked like when the Out-of-Africa folks first left Africa some 70k years ago, but we almost certainly did not develop the different racial characteristics common today until some time after that. The idea that we haven’t changed as a species in the last 100K years, as put forth by the poster I was responding to is nonsense.
Surely agriculture was a big turning point as it allowed us time to contemplate other technologies.
My understanding is that an agricultural lifestyle left LESS free time than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The needs of agriculture may themselves have led to greater knowledge–I feel sure that the people who turned teosinte into corn must have learned a great deal about plant breeding, and implicitly, about genetics.
I don’t know about this. I feel like if I hopped in my imaginary time machine and plucked someone from the 19th century and placed them in the present, I don’t think it would take them very long to acclimate. I’d say, two or three years time they would be texting and Facebooking with the rest of us.