I can’t believe people from the past (like around 6:01am) didn’t know that.
Because they have jack-shit else to do all day for years at a time besides study buffalo?
Then again, are we talking about HG socities so far back they barely had language to even articulate this stuff?
I considered the idea that those were really creation myths(buffalo coming from caves etc) much like if you asked a modern person where humans came from and they told you these two peeps in a garden.
Not from a mountain, no, but on the water I have.
One way you could miss this is if the buffalo migrate, and the place where they mate and give birth is not where your hunting territory is. Or if your tribe migrates and isn’t where the buffalo are when they breed or give birth. Not all animals breed and give birth year round the way humans do.
Buffalo are dangerous (they injure and kill people in parks in the US and Canada to this day). They’re likely to be more dangerous in the breeding season or when they have young calves. It might not be such a good idea to try to hunt or observe them at those times.
If you don’t have containers that can keep out flies, how are you going to figure this out?
Perhaps they just did not have critical thinking.
Once people discovered how to think critically and challenge earlier assumptions, then knowledge can progress. So far about 10% of the population (this is IMHO) can think critically. One day everyone will.
Hey, now, within our own lifetimes, we thought Pluto was a planet.
Put simply, the HG way of life isn’t conducive to building up knowledge about things that don’t obviously affect ones survival prospects. Probably every now and then someone made an important observation but people moved around too much to see for themselves and didn’t care much anyway.
And, more generally, it’s easy to be smart in hindsight. e.g. I bet when/if we crack the hard problem of consciousness, the model will be simple enough, and we’ll realize there were some very obvious clues all along. Why can’t you see it?
You can see more distant geographic features appear as you climb up the mountain. And you see them disappear as you climb down.
According to the bible, Jacob didn’t selectively breed sheep. He arranged an enclosure with branches or strips of wood arranged so that shadows from the branches fell on the sheep while they mated, thereby causing the offspring to have dark spots. This is the opposite of an example of folks in the past knowing how things worked.
One of the reasons that someone might think that sort of thing could work is that for sheep, solid white is dominant. So it’s possible to mate two white sheep and get speckled or colored offspring.
Maybe our ancestors were too busy to question the “why” of things, cept maybe at night watching the skies.
As a child (in the 60’s) I never thought much about soap, how it worked or where it came from, even though it was a part of daily life. Then I saw an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies where Granny was cooking up a big pot of soap in the backyard. Her ingredients were lye and pig fat. Upon questioning, the best answer my folks could give me was that was how soap was made in the old days (but not the soap we were using, they could tell I was a little freaked). Sort of accepting what they were telling me was true, my little mind then thought: Who the hell would have thought of putting these two disgusting things together (I knew that lye burned your skin and was good for disposing of dead bodies) to clean yourself with in the first place?
Some years back I finally found a plausible answer in an old book about early human use of chemistry. The author put forth this theory: After cutting up, cooking and eating by hand their kill, early hunter-gatherers would have had pretty greasy hands. Its not much of a stretch to believe that they figured out that rubbing their greasy hands in the leftover ashes (containing lye) and rinsing them in water cleaned them. Eventually they must have found out that the leftover water (with grease and ashes) also cleaned other things.
Now to the relevance of my postings. I found that the Greeks, on one of their lazy days, came up with a theory of where soap originated:
Myth has it that in 1,000 B.C. soap was discovered on Sappo Hill in Rome by a group of women rinsing their clothes in the river at the base of a hill, below a higher elevation where animal sacrifice had taken place. They noticed the clothes coming clean as they came in contact with the soapy clay oozing down the hill and into the water. They later discovered that this same cleansing substance was formed when animal fat was soaked down through the wood ashes and into the clay soil.
Wasn’t there a thread a month or two ago about how the link between sex and pregnancy in humans was only worked out 9,000 years ago? I’m not sure that HGs before that would have made the connection with respect to animals any sooner.
Do you see seeds sprouting all the time? You might see new growth coming up through the soil all the time, but, knowing that it gets bigger and better if you leave it, why would you pull it up and maybe see a seed case attached? That wouldn’t be the best use of the plant for a HG.
Other people have addressed the ‘climb a mountain’ aspect of the earth’s roundness, but an object appearing/disappearing over the watery horizon is something early people would have been very unlikely to see as fishermen never ventured out of sight of land. The shore (or the fishing canoe) might get smaller but would never disappear before they decided to come back again!
In general stuff disappearing over the horizon just tells you that the earth isn’t perfectly flat, which is obvious.
Specifically the observation of objects dropping as they go out to sea might seem odd, if you know that water finds its own level.
But again, what would be the obvious conclusion there? If you’re sure water finds its own level you might deduce that the horizon at sea couldn’t possibly be curved, and any contradictory observation can be filed with other weird shit you see on the horizon (i.e. mirages).
Yes, but that’s mostly because you climb over intervening obstructions, not because you’re seeing over the downward bend in the earth.
Sailors did. The sails of a distant ship were always visible before the rest of it. Doubt they were many hunter-gatherers observing tall ships, though.
Not necessarily.
At sea level in a relatively flat area, the distance to the horizon at eye level (5’7") is about 3 miles. Go up a hill 100 feet tall, and the horizon is 12+ miles away. Just climbing up a 20 foot tall tree lets you see almost twice as far as you can from the ground.
That’s a striking change, and it doesn’t require climbing over intervening obstructions. A hunter gatherer living on the plains would probably have figured out to climb trees to look for game farther away. Making the leap from that knowledge to the geometry of the Earth is clearly much more difficult, but the basic observations required are readily available.
My 2 favorites:
- Smoking is bad for you. Both parents smoked, and their standard excuse was they were born in the 20s, and started smoking long before the Surgeon General warning. OK, but what about people dying from smoke inhalation in fires? For years, it was well known that firemen would find bodies without a mark on them, whom it was obvious had choked on the smoke. If a lot of smoke over a short time could kill you, then a little bit repeated daily could obviously kill you as well. It was then they [ the parents ] would mutter something about ‘smartass kid’ & the discussion was over.
- The importance of washing your hands before touching food - or delivering babies. Even if they didn’t know about microbiology, why not wash fruit or veggies before putting it in your mouth? And, it took Semmelweiss into the 1800s to convince doctors to* wash their fucking hands between patients!* Doctors would go from 1 room handling bleeding & oozing wounds on 1 patient, to the maternity ward where they’d stick their (unwashed) hands into the woman giving birth! This common-sense practice of washing is still not universal; I read somewhere that a good amount of iatrogenic infections are caused by doctors & nurses not washing up between patients. Even today.