[HN Gopher] 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring
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200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring
Author : Hooke
Score : 334 points
Date : 2021-09-24 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| csomar wrote:
| Given that the Tibet is particularly cold place, shouldn't these
| humans wear something to resist the cold? Can humans (or any fur-
| less animals) survive such cold climate without extra-fat or
| really good clothes?
| adolph wrote:
| Early practitioners of Wim Hof
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof
| [deleted]
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, I can't tell if the clothing is supposed to be
| historically accurate (what clothing would survive that long?)
| or whether it's only there to satisfy modern viewers.
| themgt wrote:
| Found at 14,000ft on the Tibetan Plateau. Very likely altitude
| adapted denisovans, whose genetic adaptations to living in such
| low oxygen are still present in modern day Tibetans. Really
| incredible.
| [deleted]
| loonster wrote:
| I wonder how high it was 200k years ago.
|
| Edit: another comment mentions the mountains were formed 40-50
| million years ago. So I would presume roughly the same height.
| Leherenn wrote:
| I don't have an answer, but I would say not necessarily the
| same height. Mountains do not grow all at once or at a
| constant rate. For instance, there are some parts of the
| Himalayas that are currently growing at 1-2 cm/y. It is thus
| not impossible that this place was several hundred meters
| lower 200k years ago.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yeah, 200k is not much in geological terms.
| masklinn wrote:
| The himalayas grow actively and quickly, we're talking of
| cm/year scale.
|
| So 200kya means the site could have moved 2+km up (assuming
| a roughly constant growth rate), which is nothing to sneeze
| at or ignore. There's one hell of a difference living at
| 4000m versus 2000.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I remembered that fact, too and was wondering about it,
| how it fits with it. My conclusion was rather, that the
| growth rate was probably not constant over that time,
| because yeah, 2km is quite a lot. But others mentioned
| that this area was quite unchanged.
|
| I am going to investigate..
| Sharlin wrote:
| And they're really young for mountains (which is why they're
| so high!)
| [deleted]
| adriand wrote:
| Really amazing. I find this sort of thing absolutely haunting.
| It's a vivid reminder that there is nothing particularly
| special about this moment in time: it's only special to us
| because we're living it. But their present moment was no less
| vital and immediate and real to them as this moment is to us.
| And yet, it happened so incredibly long ago!
|
| I had the same feeling when I encountered a beautiful statue of
| a woman that was created in ancient Egypt. It was in a museum
| and I lingered at the display case, essentially just gazing
| into her eyes. Her personality shone through in some
| undefinable way: it felt like encountering another human being
| across an incredible expanse of time.
|
| These moments, I find, are very poignant in the way they remind
| us of our own mortality -- but also our deep connection to our
| ancestors and to the past.
| mrspeaker wrote:
| I got the same feeling reading the "Pompeii wall graffiti".
| It's not beautiful, but it hit me hard: 2000+ years, and
| people are the same people!
| (https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-
| of-p...)
| scotty79 wrote:
| For me it's a stark reminder that while we think of
| ourselves as smart, well off individuals that have a grip
| on the world we actually own everything to our scientific
| knowledge and infrastructure and stripped of that we'd be
| just as royally screwed as our very remote ancestors were
| because we aren't even an ounce more intelligent than them.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I noticed the same thing with a Roman marble statue! It was
| so lifelike, it felt like a real person with personality,
| draped with delicately light cloth about the shoulders and a
| keen but still vulnerable look in the eyes. It was hard to
| believe that it was made over a thousand years ago, and made
| me feel much closer as a human to both the sculptor and the
| model.
|
| Each of us feels we are the ones living in a modern age, the
| past so distant and the future so uncertain.
| dint wrote:
| https://www.billemory.com/dillard/dillard.html
| bspammer wrote:
| I disagree, there is something special about this moment in
| time. We're in an insane inflection point of human
| development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the
| same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff
| has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human
| development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several
| existential threats that might destroy civilization over the
| next few hundred years (eventually a nuke is going to fall
| into the wrong hands, not to mention climate change etc).
|
| There's a very good chance we're living the most comfortable
| lives that any creature on this planet will ever experience,
| past and future. It's truly mindblowing how lucky we are.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| In the face of accelerating change, every moment feels like
| an inflection point, and the past always looks stagnant in
| comparison. Measured from the baseline of where things are
| now, the past was so different. Measured from the baseline
| of how quickly things change now, the past was so slow.
|
| The catch is that it's true no matter when you say it from,
| so long as change is accelerating. Exponential growth is my
| favorite example. Plot y=k^t for any k from t=long time ago
| to t=T. It will look like y is at an 'insane inflection
| point,' regardless of the T you choose.
| bspammer wrote:
| Sure if you look at it from a purely mathematical point
| of view, but we can anchor ourselves to something which
| is (relatively) constant - the human lifespan. We're one
| of the first generations to feel the effects of the
| exponential curve within our lifetimes.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| If you plot anything exponential from t=T-60 years to
| t=T, it'll look just as dramatic now as ever. Try it.
| Plot Imagine you have some function like population or
| number of transistors per dollar or something that's
| exponential. You can model it as y(t) = a * b^(t+c). To
| look at how it _feels_ when you look backwards, make it
| relative to what life is like today (aka divide by the
| "normal" value y(t) to get a function of how it seems
| looking backwards y(t)/y(T) = b^(t-T).
|
| Let's make a variable for `years from now:` dt = t-T. If
| we look at the last 60 years, this is just plotting b^dt
| from dt=-60 to dt=0. It doesn't matter when you look at
| it from. The last sixty years of exponential growth
| always looks the same. It's just b^dt from dt=-60 to
| dt=0, which (being the exact same function) looks equally
| dramatic from any point.
|
| tl;dr let's make it concrete and plot 1.1^t from 1960 to
| 2020, and then plot 1.1^t 1060 to 1120. They look
| _exactly_ the same, even though each just spans a human
| life time:
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t
| %3D...
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1.1%5Et+from+t
| %3D...
| exporectomy wrote:
| You're neglecting the fact that human development is not
| exponential. Population, for instance increased in its
| growth rate over the past 1000 years, with a sudden step
| up due to the industrial revolution. It didn't look the
| same 1000 years ago as it does today. The growth rate was
| less than 10% of what it is now. If population was
| exponential, the growth rate would be constant.
| bspammer wrote:
| I understand how exponential functions work. The graph
| looks the same relatively when you normalize the axes
| obviously. From the human perspective, the absolute delta
| over those 60 years is what matters. If society improved
| 0.001 "civilization points" it will feel very different
| to an individual than if it improved by by 1000 points.
|
| A prehistoric hunter-gather saw basically zero
| technological change within their lifetime.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > From the human perspective, the absolute delta over
| those 60 years is what matters.
|
| This is what we disagree on. From the human perspective,
| it's the relative delta that matters, because we look at
| yesterday's change relative to life today.
| bspammer wrote:
| But that isn't how humans notice exponential change...
|
| We reside in a "level" of order of magnitude in time and
| space. Things that happen outside of that level, too big
| or too small, and we simply can't comprehend them. When
| something crosses from an order of magnitude below our
| level, to an order of magnitude above our level, that's
| when we can perceive it.
|
| A block accelerating exponentially from 1e-10 m/s to the
| speed of light will look completely stationary until it
| reaches a level of order of magnitude that we can
| perceive, probably about 1e-5 m/s.
|
| If I tell you I will give you an exponentially increasing
| amount of money by 1% every day, it matters a lot to you
| if I start you at 1e-200 dollars because you'll be dead
| before you earn a single cent. If you lived to 150, you'd
| be the richest person on the planet. The absolute amount
| matters because we are physical beings anchored to a
| particular order of magnitude that we care about.
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| Even if it were true that societies today are more complex,
| why is that inherently more special than a time in the past
| when life was simple? How come so many people today long
| for a much simpler life, like in the past, as if the past
| was special? The point is, special is highly subjective and
| you really should be doubting your own notions of it.
|
| In any case, I think that the original commenter really
| referred to how there's nothing so drastically different
| about the experience of being human in the present and in
| the past.
| cenari0 wrote:
| Thanks to Europeans?
|
| I wonder -- what civilisation can we attribute all this
| progress to?
|
| Romans? British? Or Americans ?
| TriNetra wrote:
| Earth has been around at least for billions of years. Our
| modern existence is only of about few hundred years. It'd
| be over estimating ourselves to think that a civilization
| like us never existed on Earth let alone other planets. As
| the technology keeps on miniaturizing, there'll be a point
| at which the verbose existence of technology would largely
| be no longer there. In that state, if the civilization is
| reset due to some cosmic incident, a tech civilization like
| us in far future will think about themselves in the same
| way. We do read about Atlantis like legend and consider
| them a myth similarly, we'd be a myth for such future
| civilization.
| lucbocahut wrote:
| I am rereading a novel from French author Rene Barjavel:
| "the ice people" on this exact theme. Scientists in the
| South Pole discover an ancient civilization 900k years
| old. Its also fun because he anticipates the near future
| quite accurately from 1968 when he wrote it. Well worth a
| read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Bar
| javel_nov...
| sdfjksbdf wrote:
| Plato made up Atlantis.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > there is something special about this moment in time.
|
| You completely missed his point. This moment is special to
| you because you are living it. Not because of the latest i9
| chip or flying cars.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > I disagree, there is something special about this moment
| in time.
|
| Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your
| children.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _So will your children_
|
| We've been on a long upward curve of progress for awhile
| now, but this isn't guaranteed to continue forever. The
| future could be a mad max / book of eli hellscape that
| may set us back two thousand years.
| cmod wrote:
| i always come back to the fact that "time travel" wasn't
| a notion until relatively recently; simply by the fact
| that so little changed on a centuries-long scale, and
| traveling through time would essentially place you in
| precisely the same spot, with the same set of experiences
| and technologies.
|
| presently, we've the opposite problem: technology
| advances so quickly it's difficult / near impossible to
| accurately predict life in five hundred years. (making
| time travel VERY COMPELLING!)
| vidarh wrote:
| Stories of time travel in some form or other goes back
| thousands of years, e.g. Hindu mythology.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| It's likely they will all look back at this particular
| period of a hundred or so years as one of the most
| pivotal times for at least one really big reason: that's
| when we set the climate on a path of destruction
| exporectomy wrote:
| Why not when we invented nuclear weapons and set
| civilization on the path of destruction? Or when we
| invented fertilizer and set the wilderness on the path of
| destruction or when we started applying science and set
| traditional stabilizing religious cultures on the path of
| destruction? I know why. It's because you're overwhelmed
| with your own contemporary culture which has
| indoctrinated you to believe that particular doomsday
| prophecy. Other cultures have/had different ones and that
| will surely continue into the future.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| Thanks for the downvote because you disagree that
| completely disrupting climate norms isn't a notable event
| that is very much happening _right now_ and will disrupt
| future generations significantly. Go read my comment
| again, I never said it was the _only_ notable event. It
| is objectively significant. So are nuclear weapons. So
| are hundreds of other things that make the last 100 years
| extremely significant in history.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Don't forget the pandemic. Plenty of people thought there
| would be some "new normal" we'd be living through for
| decades. Hell, I'm pretty sure plenty of people still
| cling to that particular doomsday scenario despite there
| being readily available, free vaccines. Look at all the
| dudes walking around outside wearing masks all along west
| coast cities..
| bspammer wrote:
| It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's
| blatently obvious that there's more going on right now,
| and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be
| lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a
| lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not
| annually.
|
| I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in
| feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve
| keeps on going and civilization doesn't end.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-
| travelled to the present day, is there anything at all
| that they conceptually couldn't fathom?
|
| Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to
| present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a
| present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that
| markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is
| the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced
| paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs.
|
| The most conceptually difficult thing would be
| understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are
| pocket-sized and everywhere.
| Aunche wrote:
| In the 1950's people technology was still relatively
| grounded in people's understanding. Any intelligent
| person in the 1950s could understand how an automobile or
| refrigerator worked if they wanted to. In present day,
| people treat technology as magic. It's easy enough to
| figure out how to use your iPhone to FaceTime someone on
| the other side of the world, but it's nearly impossible
| to truly understand how it's done.
| kungito wrote:
| Funny you should mention refrigerator because I'm pretty
| sure barely any non engineer could understand reverse
| Carnot cycle, let alone electricity on multiple levels of
| abstraction (current/fields/kirkhoffs
| laws/electromagnetism)
| OJFord wrote:
| You're responding to a comparison to >10k years ago
| (8000BC) with '1950s America'?
| bspammer wrote:
| On the scales we're talking about, I would include the
| 1950s as "present-day". I would include the last 300
| years as "particularly special"
| jfoutz wrote:
| One of my ancestors father was wealthy. They took long
| trips over the summer. One year, she came home and they
| had electricity. One year, they had a telephone. She saw
| one of the demonstrations of flight by the wright
| brothers. A global pandemic. No war is good, but I'd put
| the world wars as particularly bad. She saw people drive
| cars on the moon, on television!
|
| ~1905-1985 was a pretty good run.
|
| Cell phones, the internet, mrna vaccines. There's
| probably tons of amazing stuff I'm overlooking. I don't
| think I would trade with Katherine. Although, I wish she
| was around for a few years longer so I could talk to her
| when I was closer to being an adult.
|
| I don't think you could find a modern technology that
| would throw her for a loop. Maybe, but she's a cherry
| picked example.
| beambot wrote:
| Don't forget refrigeration and automobiles. 1885-1985 was
| an amazing century!
| adventured wrote:
| > is there anything at all that they conceptually
| couldn't fathom?
|
| Well you set the bar artificially high with that
| phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last
| couple thousand years would be literally unable to
| conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts,
| they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even
| if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s
| Americans, or any citizens around the world at the time,
| would be more than astounded by 3-4 billion people being
| essentially always connected on a gigantic, seemingly
| instantaneous global communications and commerce network.
| The modern smartphone would similarly astound, what they
| can do all-in-one and the quality of it (the audio, the
| video, the music, movies, news, communication, click-
| button services & purchasing, digitization of money, the
| quality of digital photographs and how many you can take
| with no regard for space, it would all astound). Someone
| from the 1980s would be just as astounded by a recent
| iPhone, they'd feel like a time traveler.
|
| People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It
| almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It
| put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for
| everyone in the tech industry, without exception. Maybe
| people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had,
| I haven't forgotten.
|
| That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're
| not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every
| year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally.
|
| CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics,
| Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software,
| computers including personal, space flight, powered
| flight, various engines, electricity and electric light,
| fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green
| revolution outcomes (food production), solar and a few
| key renewable energy technologies, the
| commercial/industrial laser, and so on.
|
| There are several dozen things that can be added to that
| list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade
| globally might be a reasonable peg.
| thefounder wrote:
| >> truly astounded by the iPhone.
|
| For some reasons I was not truly astounded at all. I had
| several smartphones before but I preferred smaller "cool"
| phones until iPhone 4.
|
| The iphone became for phones what the ipod was for music
| players. Great device but not really from the future. I
| bought it for the web browser.
|
| Even today I use my iphone perhaps at 10% of its power
| mostly for things that I do on my laptop anyway(mail,
| chat, web browsing) so
|
| I'm actually astounded that I can't hook it to a monitor
| and use it as a computer/macbook so to me it seems we got
| stuck in the past.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It
| almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It
| put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for
| everyone in the tech industry, without exception.
|
| This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It
| was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.
| rvense wrote:
| I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or
| less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from
| a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or
| cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC
| tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at
| home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm
| pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my
| world.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and
| the technology was already there, so not like it came out
| overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.
| rvense wrote:
| "The future is already here, it's just not evenly
| distributed."
|
| Most people were blissfully unaware of the existence of
| PDAs, much less how they worked or what they could do,
| and for them the iPhone might as well have emerged
| perfectly formed from an unspecified bodily orifice of
| Steve Jobs. The statement "It almost _felt like_ a
| product delivered from the future" is entirely justified.
| z3t4 wrote:
| People give too much credit to the iPhone. There where a
| lot of full screen smart-phones before the iPhone
|
| The same with mp3 players before iPod.
|
| Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is
| in their own league, like for example a company selling
| flavored water bottles while there's good quality water
| taps available almost everywhere. They can take something
| that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the
| price, and at the same time make people think it's
| revolutionary.
| erdos4d wrote:
| > Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually.
|
| Where do you live? The last sorta revolutionary tech I
| saw in my life was the cellphone, and I strain to see
| that as actually revolutionary in any meaningful way, to
| be honest.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Hinge of history. Effective altruism folks look at it
| mathematicaly. Historians look at it historically. Most
| humans look at it with their senses.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| By symmetry of the exponential curve, your ancestors
| would be just as justified.
| sfblah wrote:
| I don't think this is quite right. To take a European
| example, the ancient Romans discovered concrete, then
| successor civilizations largely forgot how it worked for
| ~500+ years. Not all eras of history even had a positive
| slope to the curve.
| Jensson wrote:
| Another example of Rome. It took over 1000 years before
| another city in the world became as big as Rome in its
| heyday.
| gumby wrote:
| > it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right
| now...
|
| Blatantly _obvious_? Not to me. I 'm a technologist (e.g.
| wrote a bunch of code the results of which you use every
| day) with a degree in history and in many ways ancient
| Greece seems more vital than today.
| edgyquant wrote:
| We've legit left the planet and put people on the moon.
| The past hundred years has absolutely been something
| special in the history of the human race
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| The person you're replying to seems to argue that the
| founders of our civilization were more vital than us, who
| are merely building upon their legacy.
| gumby wrote:
| I did say " _seems_ more vital" because I have read a lot
| of the classics, for enjoyment and instruction, and find
| a lot of current writing on the topics discussed in
| classical literature to be derivative at best.
|
| TBF there's a survivorship bias in older work: the stuff
| people found useful has been more likely to survive. Also
| a more modern (i.e. anyone in the subsequent couple of
| millennia) has to say something new, not just repeat the
| old. Which is harder to do.
|
| I'm not arguing that the current world isn't amazing
| (went to the moon! Reduction in poverty and higher living
| standard! I'm typing this comment on an iPad!). Simply
| making the point that it's hardly uniquely so (and
| arguably the 2021st century has so far not been the peak
| of technical or social development).
|
| What is unusual of the current age is the widespread
| belief that the current times are somehow unusual.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| It's a certainty that people in the future will look at
| us and say "they were merely building the future for us"
| and "right now is most important, not back then".
|
| We have been saying this forever, and will continue to do
| so.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd put just a bit of water in your wine. You're basing
| your view on technology and technological output, but in
| other cultures and times it might be of zero value.
| Personally that's not what qualifies for a special moment
| in history (the potential ecological collapse is higher).
|
| Also consider that technology, even in it's most
| beautiful form, is rarely seen by people. They live in a
| blur of tamed down ease of use. It's not necessarily an
| existential enlightenment for them (it also backfires a
| lot, people are leaving devices to go back to more time
| outside and sport, look at parkour and people living in
| the wild for instance)
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| Well, that is unclear. Writing from Europe 100-1500 years
| ago suggests that most people felt quite different about
| time and did not have the impression the GP espoused. The
| overwhelming impression seems to be that things had
| fallen since the end of the (western) Roman Empire; there
| was a contrast in millenarian movements in the 10th
| century as the turn of the millennium approached.
|
| However people are not uniformly distributed and such
| belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the
| contemporaneous Arab world.
|
| All that being said: I agree with you that claims that
| our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I'm not so sure they felt that way. For the average
| person life was pretty stagnant before the industrial
| revolution. You lived roughly the same way that your
| parents did. You used the same tools and techniques in
| farming. You did mostly the same things socially. You
| dressed in roughly the same types of clothes (or at least
| clothing materials).
|
| Historical estimates for GDP per capita put it around $2
| per day in 2011 prices. And that stayed fairly constant -
| it doubled in maybe a thousand years, if at all. Compare
| that to today: US GDP per capita has nearly tripled in my
| lifetime.
|
| Politically things might've been just as turbulent back
| then though. New overlords and all that would be more
| impactful back then than now.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| What major technological advancements like space travel,
| internet, computers, cell phones do you think the typical
| person 2000 years ago actually saw and knew about?
|
| The (lack of) inter-connectedness of the world would
| effect the way our ancestors felt about their moment in
| time.
| sgregnt wrote:
| Just wanted to share my opinion. I'm not sure if the number
| of existential threads for humanity is now larger than 200k
| years ago. My take would be it is probably much smallest
| than even 1k years ago. Nukes will not destroy civilization
| (it might be horrible disaster on the scale of WW2 but not
| civ. distruction.). Arguably we are now have better ways to
| adapt to climate changes and it or meteorite impact. And
| who knows, in another 100 years we might be an
| interplanetary species. AI might not be a thread like some
| suggests, and the up sides to productivity are enormous.
| TriNetra wrote:
| Another interesting data point I'd like to share here is
| that of multiple stories found mentioned in ancient Hindu
| texts called puranas (which means historic). These stories
| talk about humans traveling to far away planets (lokas)
| wherein the wheel of time moves much slower than on Earth
| and thus is an indication of ancient Hindu knowledge of the
| phenomenon of time dilation. For instance, consider this
| story of King Kakudmi and his daughter [0]:
|
| > Kakudmi's daughter Revati was so beautiful and so
| accomplished that when she reached a marriageable age,
| Kakudmi, thinking no one upon earth was worthy of her, went
| to the Creator himself, Lord Brahma, to seek his advice
| about a suitable husband for his daughter. When they
| arrived, Brahma was listening to a musical performance by
| the Gandharvas, so they waited patiently until the
| performance was finished. Then, Kakudmi bowed humbly, made
| his request and presented his shortlist of candidates.
| Brahma laughed loudly and explained that time runs
| differently on different planes of existence, and that
| during the short time they had waited in Brahma-loka to see
| him, 27 chatur-yugas (a cycle of four yugas, totalling 108
| yugas) had passed on earth. Brahma said to Kakudmi, "O
| King, all those whom you may have decided within the core
| of your heart to accept as your son-in-law has died in the
| course of time. Twenty-seven chatur-yugas have already
| passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are
| now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other
| descendants. You cannot even hear about their names.[2] You
| must therefore bestow this virgin gem (i.e. Revati) upon
| some other husband, for you are now alone, and your
| friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies,
| and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand
| of time."[3]King Kakudmi was overcome with astonishment and
| alarm at hearing this news.[3] However, Brahma comforted
| him and added that Vishnu, the preserver, was currently
| incarnate on earth in the forms of Krishna and Balarama,
| and he recommended Balarama as a worthy husband for
| Revati.Kakudmi and Revati then returned to earth which they
| regarded as having left only just a short while ago. They
| were shocked by the changes that had taken place. Not only
| had the landscape and environment changed, but over the
| intervening 27 chatur-yugas, in the cycles of human
| spiritual and cultural evolution, mankind was at a lower
| level of development than in their own time (see Ages of
| Man). The Bhagavata Purana describes that they found the
| race of men had become "dwindled in stature, reduced in
| vigour, and enfeebled in intellect."The daughter and father
| found Balarama and proposed the marriage which was
| accepted. The marriage was then duly celebrated.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakudmi
| ugh123 wrote:
| I think you could say that about the industrial revolution.
| However, the events in the past 20 years seem to indicate
| humanity is moving backwards
|
| >There's a very good chance we're living the most
| comfortable lives that any creature on this planet will
| ever experience, past and future. It's truly mindblowing
| how lucky we are.
|
| The disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this
| moment in time would truly bewilder anyone in ancient
| history if they could see whats happening today. There are
| likely _more_ people living in poverty today than there
| were 200 years ago, in absolute numbers - not percentage.
| yostrovs wrote:
| In percentage, poverty is probably at its lowest in
| history.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/ has some
| interesting ideas that agree with you.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Could it be that in the distant future if you at human
| history (or even the history of life on Earth) from far
| enough away to smooth out the little bumps, it turns out
| that we 20th and 21st century humans are in fact in a
| pretty unremarkable point along an exponential curve?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The past 200 or so years have included the invention of
| the lightbulb and the first trips to our moon and other
| planets. Given how long we've been on the planet, I think
| this is indeed a special time and future historians will
| always look upon this era that way. They'll probably
| refer to it as when humanity started walking, or spoke
| its first word.
| katzgrau wrote:
| Def, as far as we know, we're just a little slope upward.
|
| And I'm not sure what the Y axis is even measuring.
| bspammer wrote:
| If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things
| go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first
| generations to see major change _within_ our short lives.
| For millions of years, technology and tools stayed
| roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25,
| and the technological progress since I was born is mind-
| blowing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > we're still one of the first generations to see major
| change _within_ our short lives.
|
| One could argue that people were seeing major
| technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes
| within their lives at least as far back as the
| Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than
| that), and what has actually changed is just that the
| number of people affected by those changes has grown
| (perhaps exponentially). Likewise in the future the rate
| of change we're so impressed by now may look laughable,
| and that's even ignoring the possibility of significant
| lifespan extension in the future!
| noir_lord wrote:
| Lets accept that the rate of change of technology during
| the enlightenment was as rapid as the last 100 years (it
| wasn't but lets accept it) - that was two centuries ago,
| these prints are 200K _years ago_ , that's 3 orders of
| magnitude older.
|
| There have been points in our history where
| technology/knowledge has advanced quicker than the
| baseline but the last two-three centuries (and
| particularly the last one) have been _exceptional_.
|
| Whether that rate of change is sustainable for another
| century I don't know, I'd like to hope so since it'd mean
| humans are doing pretty well.
|
| But if you took someone born in 1880 (a century before
| me) and they lived 90 years they'd have seen _the
| invention of flight, the invention of the motorcar, the
| electrification of the world, the invention of wireless,
| the invention of TV, the invention of the internet, the
| invention of antibiotics, the invention of synthetic
| materials, the invention of the telephone, the first
| heart transplant, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the
| discovery of the structure of DNA and literally thousands
| of other technologies and discoveries_ in one human
| lifespan _).
|
| At no other point in human history has a single life span
| seen _so much*.
| spullara wrote:
| Only if we populate the galaxy. Which isn't that hard if
| we try. But even then we lived at the origin of the
| galactic species. Pretty special.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Populating the galaxy isn't that hard? Care to explain?
| Jensson wrote:
| If you had todays technology and 100 million years to do
| it it wouldn't be particularly hard. The hard part is
| getting things done within our lifetime, but that doesn't
| matter for something like populating a galaxy. Slow ships
| are just fine, humans can reproduce on the ship. High
| failure rate and those ships being huge and expensive
| isn't a problem if you have thousands of years of
| production to make them.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The Universe is a lot bigger than our galaxy though. Why
| is it more special to live near the beginning of humans
| populating the galaxy than, say, living near the
| beginning of humans populating that new subdivision
| they're developing out at the edge of my town?
| tnzm wrote:
| Because the galaxy is a lot bigger than that subdivision,
| too.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I know just the feeling you mean. I get it when I read
| history too, especially biographies that cover a whole life.
|
| I can't remember where I originally read this but once
| someone suggested that you could also invert this idea for a
| fresh perspective on the modern world.
|
| If there was a time machine that I could step into to meet
| these ancient people and ask them about the hand prints they
| left I would take that trip in a snap! (assuming there is
| enough fuel in the Delorean to get back of course) In fact I
| would take that chance to time travel to any period and see
| what that time was like up close.
|
| While we can't go back and see that, we can time travel to
| exactly one place. You can look around and see how humans
| were living in September 2021. Maybe this is the moment
| stranded time travelers 200k years from now would really like
| to visit. It was a weird time in human history. Lots of
| interesting things to observe, questions to ask, and people
| to meet.
| neilv wrote:
| And one could help those people we find today to tell their
| stories, in a way that will be accessible to people in the
| future (decades, centuries, or hours in the future).
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| It's awesome, But bit disappointed that the artist's impression
| shows them bare body without any protection from the elements
| while clearly showing the elevation. They would have obviously
| had very thick clothing made up of animal fur.
| lugged wrote:
| Would have been closer to 10000 feet back then but incredible
| nonetheless.
| cletus wrote:
| What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at
| high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't
| that many people around so finding land with available food and
| water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue.
|
| One possible argument is that such people would transit high
| altitudes going between hunting grounds (for example) but is
| this really enough pressure to produce a genetic advantage like
| this?
|
| Now nature does tend to want to find niches because having food
| only you can eat tends to be of more value than having abundant
| food other people can also eat (eg pandas and bamboo).
|
| But it's not easy for humans to live at 14,000 feet elevation.
| Animals are scarce. Vegetation is limited (eg trees likely to
| be conifers).
|
| This is different to just, say, living in Arctic regions as
| those do have much more available food options (eg fish,
| migrating game, plants that can grow in the summer) than high
| altitudes.
|
| Has anyone put much thought into this?
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Not an anthropologist, but my first hypothesis would be
| avoiding other humans (war and predation). Perhaps disease-
| carrying insects as well.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The 'why' is pretty much unknowable. Evolution doesn't push
| organisms to do new things, it simply responds to existing
| selective constraints. What we observe is that Humans (even
| archaic ones) seem to have expanded into virtually every
| region they could find, regardless of how hospitable it was.
| This particular set of changes happens to reduce
| physiological stress at high altitude, so it was preserved in
| populations experiencing that constraint.
| adolph wrote:
| High altitude survival probably wasn't as important as the
| advantages of efficient oxygen use. Imagine living every day
| like you blood dope like Lance Armstrong!
|
| _Live high /train low is a training method in which athletes
| live at high altitude and train at low altitude, usually with
| the goal of improving performance at sea level. The main idea
| is to reap the benefits of high altitude acclimatization
| while maintaining the intensity of low altitude training._
|
| https://www.nsca.com/education/articles/nsca-coach/is-
| live-h...
| masklinn wrote:
| > What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live
| at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you?
|
| Having exclusive use of an ecological niche is pretty
| advantageous.
|
| > There really weren't that many people around so finding
| land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would
| be that much of an issue.
|
| While density was (likely) quite low, so was "productivity",
| and people were no less territorial, just because you didn't
| need all that space didn't mean you'd allow other groups to
| exploit it.
| prescriptivist wrote:
| Just spitballing but maybe at that altitude humans tipped
| some sort of scale where they were more efficient predators
| of whatever was up there but below that altitude the larger
| pleistocene megafauna of the time represented a higher
| predation risk to humans themselves or there was less post
| kill (scavenger) competition.
| toshk wrote:
| There are lots of them. In many places in Tibet I've seen them,
| especially in the old Kham area, they were all over the place.
| The Tibetans believe it's prove of the depth of meditation that
| one can put the hand in the rock.
|
| Source:
| https://books.google.es/books?id=OUhmDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=P...
| subsubzero wrote:
| Thats right, the explanation for these handprints is that
| Tibetan Buddhist monks have transcended normal human
| abilities and made handprints in stone. This is for Vajrayana
| Buddhism or what westerners refer to as Tibetan Buddhism.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Seems unlikely.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| This is covered in the article, but: the term art is quite
| generous here. These may not even have been imprinted
| intentionally. Fascinating nonetheless.
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| It doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in fact,
| it says the opposite. (These are carefully made so they don't
| overlap and they were not produced by locomotion.)
|
| If this is "art" art... is up to everyone to interpret for
| themselves.
|
| But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema,
| squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people
| will call it art.
| xwdv wrote:
| > But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema,
| squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people
| will call it art.
|
| Jesus, what artist is this a reference to?
| dboreham wrote:
| Parent is unknownOrigin not Jesus.
| olalonde wrote:
| The Big Lebowski has a scene not quite like that but in the
| same spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMbc1Q2OQ4.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| > It doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in
| fact, it says the opposite.
|
| > The fossil impressions, which date to between 169,000 and
| 226,000 years ago and _seem_ to have been created
| intentionally, _could_ represent the earliest known art of
| its kind.
|
| > According to Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth
| University who specializes in ancient footprints and
| trackways, it's _likely_ that these ancient imprints were
| intentional.
|
| Emphasis mine.
| jrsdav wrote:
| Whenever I see things like this, I'm reminded of Arthur C.
| Clarke's novel Childhood's End.
|
| _spoilers_
|
| I like to imagine I've been given the device used by the
| overlords to monitor earth for X years, and I can stand affixed
| in a position to experience the timelapse as I push "rewind". It
| would be so cool to watch history unfold this way.
| dmux wrote:
| Sounds like something I'd really enjoy. Observing one
| particular space over time is the concept behind the graphic
| novel** "Here" by Richard McGuire.
|
| ** It's really light on dialogue (and characters for that
| matter). Way more emphasis on the Graphic part than the Novel
| part.
| aomobile wrote:
| Hello message from the ancestors!
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Oldest "Hello world!" ever
| tclancy wrote:
| More like a dirty joke, surely.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| Art is (almost) forever.
| xwdv wrote:
| Incredible that a child 200k years ago left something behind that
| we can still see today.
|
| I struggle to imagine what I could do today that someone 200k
| years from now would find. Any ideas?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Scratch your name into Hoover Dam? A handprint in wet cement?
| akomtu wrote:
| Build a massive coil out of stone around a ferromagnetic core,
| 500 feet high, engrave walls with Maxwell and QM diff
| equations, so future generations would know that our
| civilization was built around electromagnetism. In reality,
| though, they'll think it's a tower of power with inscripted
| incantations for rituals.
| jfengel wrote:
| Some of those hand prints are highly distorted. Is that just due
| to the topology of the rock?
| werdnapk wrote:
| Or the fact that these have been slowly eroded over 200,000
| years.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science
| fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from
| now
| sojournerc wrote:
| Last and First Men
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men
| toshk wrote:
| The assumption by some of the scientist is that the handprints
| were created in the mud and then stones formed. But others
| question this, could also be created after:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/art-not-ancient...
|
| It's very common to find handprints in the Himalayas in rocks,
| they are everywhere.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Hopefully people thinking about us 200k years from now will
| consider us as primitive as we consider the people from 200k
| years ago.
| adolph wrote:
| Well, not to give away the plot, but two of the things that
| happen are the Y10k event and then the Y100K event. You'd think
| people would be well prepared but people are still people--
| there is a ton more legacy code each time and they don't know
| if the fixes will really work until it happens.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| probably like Mercury looks today - a ball of fire
| Bobylonian wrote:
| Mercury today is ball of fire from one side and ball of cold
| charcoal from other.
|
| 200k is quite a massive time period and the only thing is
| certain that modern humans would be long dead and most of
| them would share fate of Denisovans, where most of modern
| people would not be direct ancestors to people of that
| distant future. That is a very long time for humanity to
| exterminate itself to near extinction and achieve the same
| technological level 3-4 times over again.
| bradlys wrote:
| Maybe you mean Venus.
|
| Regardless of which - it's a massive over exaggeration. We're
| not gonna be experiencing fluctuations of 500C+ on the
| surface of our planet or an atmospheric pressure of 90x+
| ours.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| In case anyone else forgot the timeline, I just googled, and
| there's evidence going back to ~2 million years ago of huminoids
| in Eurasia.
| mc32 wrote:
| Wouldn't that upend most theories about when the people who
| left Africa left Africa?
|
| Never mind, new estimates go as far back as 300,000ya.
| elvongray wrote:
| There are other hominids apart from homo sapiens during those
| periods. These will probably be Denisovans
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| No, it's known that Homo Erectus left Africa and colonised
| Eurasia up to East Asia a bit more than 2 million years ago.
|
| The estimate on when "we" left Africa often means modern
| humans, Homo Sapiens.
| grillvogel wrote:
| most of the established timelines are based on "well this is
| the oldest thing we've found so far". most of it is probably
| wrong
| pomian wrote:
| Article states found at 12000'. I wonder how much lower the
| mountains were, 100k years ago? They are for sure not static. Bet
| some geologist somewhere should be able to give us a yearly
| estimate. Interesting.
| masklinn wrote:
| IIRC the himalayas grow at 1~2cm/year, assuming a constant
| growth rates 100kya the area would have been about 1km lower,
| or about 8500ft
| mycoborea wrote:
| Any chance they could recover some DNA?
| Kibae wrote:
| > A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa
| birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521
| years. [1]
|
| So at most ~5.6% of DNA could have survived. It would be
| interesting if researchers would be able to detect a fraction
| of that amount, but it seems implausible.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-long-does-
| dn... | https://archive.is/S39fv
| vonadz wrote:
| Impressive that this didn't get worn away.
| neaden wrote:
| "These prints, however, are more carefully made and have a
| specific arrangement--think more along the lines like how a child
| presses their handprint into fresh cement." A good reminder of
| the fact that for all that society has changed we as people
| haven't really.
| sva_ wrote:
| It is interesting to see how people seem to intuitively
| experience joy from changing their environment, in particular
| when it seems to not serve any direct use.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Either that or we have changed enough that we are now capable
| of being creative, in terms of both art and theorizing about
| prehistory. Personally I think it's the latter.
|
| If we were capable of appreciating art 200,000 years ago, we
| also must have been incredibly lazy. How could well over
| another 150,000 years pass before we left signs that we were
| improving our technology? It doesn't make any sense.
| delecti wrote:
| It leaves me feeling very connected to think that across
| hundreds of thousands of year, you'll still find humans being
| humans. Creating handprint art has to be one of the most
| lasting and quintessentially human behaviors.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's inspiring to get hints at what life was like back then when
| the universe was younger.
| Razengan wrote:
| I think that even at the scale of "just" a two hundred thousand
| years, to the _universe_ it's probably just yesterday.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| "When humanity was younger" would have been a perfect
| phrasing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| or even just an hour ago.
| tejtm wrote:
| It was, (and still is), 40-50 million years since the mountains
| formed.
| Sharlin wrote:
| When the universe was an appreciable fraction younger, all life
| on Earth was unicellular.
| scollet wrote:
| And those uncultured bastards didn't even think to leave a
| note.
| 7773777 wrote:
| A monoculture is still a culture!
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's fascinating to think how they lived full lives and
| probably even pondered the ancients (relative to them.)
| nanna wrote:
| Hugely enjoyed The Hunters of Prehistory by Andre Leroi-Gourhan.
| Such an inspiring introduction to paleolithic archeology, even if
| it's inevitably a bit dated these days, and it is Eurocentric.
| Great as an introduction to structuralism too, and philosophy of
| technics.
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