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What I don't get is how ancient humans figured out more complex stuff. Like neanderthals learned how to make a glue to hold their weapons together. It was probably a simple method, like this article talks about, but it still took a lot of planning and also a lot of basic reasoning before trying it themselves if it was even something that could be done.
I would say it a combination of two things:
- People walked around for around ~300.000 years before inventing agriculture. That's a lot of time to find out things by accident. We learned about antibiotics by accident. I'm sure also stumbled upon many inventions by pure luck.
- Caveman were smart. As smart as we are. Average person is not going to invent electronic watches but there's always this 1% that's more curious and intelligent that will experiment and discover things.
Combine this and you have 300.000 years of very slow but steady progress fuelled by chance discoveries and occasional geniuses.
Oh I'm certainly aware of the second part. It still astounds me that they were able to figure out things like that without just observing the natural world. Here's another example, although it may not apply to the early agricultural world because I don't know when it was first cultivated. Who figured out that the leaves of rhubarb were poison and the stalks are only edible with further processing? According to Wikipedia, it's been cultivated for at least 1800 years. How do you figure out, "well, this is making people sick, but what if we just ate the stems but cooked them a whole lot first?"
I would imagine a lot of it has to do with food scarcity. There weren't trucks and boats and planes to transport food back then. You had to eat what was available in your specific patch of dirt. If there aren't a lot of food options where you live, and what is available can make you sick, you might start trying to prepare it and eat it in different ways until it stops making you sick.
For most people, rhubarb is one of hundreds of options of things to buy from a grocery store. To our ancient ancestors, it may have been one of a small handful of things that grew where they lived, and therefore a necessity to figure out how to eat it.
I eat raw rhubarb all the time. I usually pull a stalk off to munch on as I mow the lawn. They probably just ate the stalk first, enjoyed it, and some stopped there, while others didn't. Doesn't take much more experimentation than that to learn that the stalks are edible and tasty, while the leaves aren't.
Yeah, animals know what plants to avoid. I would say that when it comes to what was poisonous monkeys already knew that and people didn't have to rediscover it.
The thing that bums me out is how much human potential gets wasted. Like how many wicked smart kids with the potential to cure cancer or make fusion viable or whatever never got a chance to realise that potential cos they didn't have access to the education to realise that potential cos systemic inequality or racism or colonialism or just bad luck.
I imagine a lot of boredom (besides staying alive), helps finding out stuff. I can also imagine, that they had basic roles in a group, where people were designated "mess around with stuff and discover things, aka proto scientists"
I'm sure that's a big part of it, but it still amazes me the things they figured out how to achieve artificially, especially when they had no natural analogue. Like who figured out how to brew beer?
Stir the drink with the magic stick and wait a few days and it goes bubbly, tastes better, and stops poisoning people
I'm not saying it was aliens, but ...
It was aliens.
SUPREME commander.