Cavemen were really busy chasing various animals and running away from various animals. Then there's whole exploring new lands and encountering other humans species. Progress could be slow and cataclysm were a many
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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Once humans started cooking food and writing stuff down. We progressed rapidly.
Actually the biggest factor was most likely the development of language, which probably required certain evolutionary traits in order to be possible. With language, collaboration and cooperation become much easier, which leads to fire and cooking and other ideas like that. You get to writing things down a lot later.
God these people are dumb.
Imagine thinking like that. Does this guy not know how technology works, has he been alive for only 5 minutes.
If you want to see the rapid progress of technology go look at video games, 20 years ago if you had 30 polygons on screen at the same time you were doing well, now we have photo realistic graphics.
Solid point, yeah but 20 years ago was 2005.
GTA: San Andreas released 21 years ago.
Half-life 2 released 21 years ago.
Morrowind released 23 years ago.
Ocarina of Time released 27 years ago.
Crash Bandicoot released 29 years ago.
Star Fox released 32 years ago and had 500-600 tris on any given frame.
DOOM also released the same year, but is not true 3D
Obviously your point still stands, but full true 3D games were common by the late 90's, and pseudo 3D games were prevelant as early as '92 with Wolfenstein 3D.
Unfortunately, time flies.
Technology grows exponentially. What doesn't add up is OOP's brainpower.
Technology grows exponentially.
There's a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it's not exponential, but sigmoid.
Early in the study of a scientific field, discoveries are slow and difficult. But as the benefits of research are industrialized, you see a critical mass of research and human labor invested in applied sciences. You see a surge in development up until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Then the benefits of research diminish and the cost of maintaining the libraries of information and education grow beyond the perceived benefit of further academic work. Investments slow and labor product diminishes over time. Existing infrastructure cements itself as the norm and improvements become more expensive to impose. Finally, the advances in technology plateau for a period of time.
Eventually, you hit on another breakthrough and there's a new surge in investment and novel infrastructure, until that well of new useful information is exhausted.
Periods of rapid and transformative growth may look meager and unimpressive in hindsight simply because you are standing on the shoulders of giants. But can anyone seriously argue that the steam engine (17th century) was less significant than the nuclear power plant (20th century), when a nuclear power plant has - at its core - a very high efficiency steam engine? We don't seem to recognize 300 years of internal combustion as a period of relative technological stagnation.
While that may be true for individual technologies; in aggregate across all technologies.
Technical growth seems exponential; maybe sometime in the future technical advancement itself will resemble the 'S' curve; but for now we are still growing our technical prowess extremely quickly.
It may also be correlated with the population, though. Specifically the working age population.
I imagine that, as populations decrease and you have fewer people available to actually do any research, technological advancement also stagnates and slows down. If populations ever start increasing again in the future, then I imagine technological development will grow as well
It's almost as though we shouldn't have made killbots 🤔
Yup, it turns out it's a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.
Anon (plural) isn't exactly famous for their intelligence
Big AFAIK: The anatomically correct human first appeared roughly 300.000 years ago. In the next 200.000 years they almost certainly genocided all their relatives. After a couple of behavioural changes here and there they had a mutation about 50.000 years ago which changed their brains, improved their communication skills immensely and they finally and truly became what humans are today. But they still wandered around until they finally started growing shit in the ground about 13.000 years ago. But it took about 7.000 additional years for some nerd to start writing roughly 5.000 years ago.
So yeah. The milestones are happening in ever shorter intervals.
Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT 4. For only $200/mo, you can experience this magical moment for yourself with unlimited access to our best ChatGPT models!
There was no mutation, or at least there's no evidence for it. The big change 50.000 years ago likely happened because population density finally became large enough to meaningfully transmit and preserve culture.
I wouldn't say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.
My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.
There's good evidence that homo sapiens didn't invent the shovel. That was technology almost certainly taken from another human species, which suggests a fairly integrated society. You could imagine different species of human all living together, it is certainly behaviour that has been observed in other primates so there is precedent.
Damn, imagine the levels of segregation, speciesm and genocide we would see if other human species had thrived and grown like us.
They genocided each other too.
The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That's a lot of killing and raping
Wait, I am stupid. Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated? And assuming the birth rates are the same, why wouldn't there be women skeletons? After all, everyone dies, whether in a fist fight over who gets to have sex at 14 or of cancer at like 70?
Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated?
Actively bludgeoned by another tribe and then thrown in a pit. These are young men, I should add
why wouldn’t there be women skeletons?
They are not killed, but captured and carried away as spoils of war to the conquering tribe
They are not killed, but captured and carried away as spoils of war to the conquering tribe
So why aren't there women skeletons at those conquering tribes? They had to die somewhere.
I believe you misread, they said a high number of males with evidence of trauma. Basically a very large percentage of male skeletons showed damage. The original comment didn't say there were no female skeletons.
Also depending on the dig site mass graves of men killed in combat are common. Those would obviously lack women.
So why aren’t there women skeletons at those conquering tribes? They had to die somewhere.
There probably are, but we don't stumble across them as easily as we do the mass grave dig sites I think
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they spent a large chunk of that 190k years hooting at each other because it took FOREVER to develop language
Progress is exponential, anon.
That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.
no it must be aliens
shit good point
Every invention or discovery sped up our development. We wasted hundreds of thousands of years chasing prey and foraging for food with little to no time or energy to spare for anything else. Agriculture gave us excess time and energy to pursue other things than bare survival. Writing allowed us to better record and share ideas and knowledge. Mathematics allowed us to better understand the world. Fertilizer allowed us to boost our food production and population, which meant more brains to figure things out. Computers allowed us to almost instantly solve problems that would have taken centuries to do by hand, further speeding up our technological development. All of it has been exponential so far.
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There wasn't really a material need to invent concepts such as agriculture, debt and other kinds of concepts we recognize as part of documented human history and development. There's no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via hunting and gathering, neither do you need wheels for transportation. Once there was a historical need due to higher populations or weather not allowing foraging, that's when the concepts got invented and allowed us to build on that with other discoveries and concepts that led us here.
If there's one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it's that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn't happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don't happen until the population is starving.
If anything in history is impressive it's the rare individuals and societies that change before they're forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.
Congrats anon, you just reinvented Historical Materialism.
There's no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via farming
That is wisdom right there
Whoops, that's what you get when you don't read what you write
Fake: Anon understands maths
Gay: Anon thinks about hairy men
Take it back farther.
First cellular life 3,800,000,000 years ago. Then 3,300,000,000 years of just single cell organisms. Then in the last 15% of the history of life on Earth, everything else.
Anon forgets that progression isn't linear.
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