kabatta on 10/3/2010 at 08:39
Sounds interesting. From where did you get all that information?
Tenkahubu on 10/3/2010 at 09:14
Given that most people on the earth still believe in a giant invisible superman who's intellect is incomprehensibly superior to our own yet is obsessively concerned in the minutiae of our day to day lives, I suspect that in the grand scheme of things we are still in the age of un-enlightenment and future ages will lump us in with previous eras (while perhaps acknowledging rapid technological advancement).
Much as from our perspective all pre-19th Century peoples are generally considered quaint at best or barbaric at worst.
Nicker on 10/3/2010 at 10:06
I am sure that if you took a infant from any place or time in the ancient world and raised them in this day and age they would be indistinguishable from their modern descendants.
In the case of lost knowledge, it's more that we can't appreciate the understanding those people found in their world and we project our ignorance of them upon them.
What we see as arbitrary myths, superstitions and stories often seem to preserve a deeper comprehension of the universe than we give credit for. I'd even suggest that superstition or sympathetic magic (as an expression of our human compulsion to understand, explain and predict), is the earliest ancestor of the modern scientific method.
reizak on 10/3/2010 at 11:06
From a purely physiological perspective we aren't any more intelligent than people in ancient times were. A few thousand years isn't enough for notable differences to manifest in the average brain. If (
if) we appear smarter, it's only because we have more amassed knowledge to draw from, and free access to it.
A good illustration of our limited perception of the past would be the (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/dec/11/antikythera-first-computer) Antikythera (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism) mechanism. That thing is almost two millenia ahead of its time (or what we like to think "its time" should've been like); who really knows what else there is that we'll never know about, as fett elaborated on.
History at best is a story that we've constructed to make sense of where we are and where we've come from, with varying degrees of facts to support our views, but at the end of the day there's a whole lot of guesswork and confirmation bias involved.
BrokenArts on 10/3/2010 at 14:33
Depends on who we might be listening to at that given moment. The Discovery Channel has had some excellent shows on king Tutankhamens life. They were doing DNA testing on his family, quite fascinating. They were far more intelligent than we give them credit for. I'd like to believe so anyway. The Greeks invented the shower, coined money, maps, thermometer, and the tumber lock just to name a few.
demagogue on 10/3/2010 at 14:40
The ancient Greeks (by the time of Aristotle ~300BCE) already knew the world was spherical.
I remember reading something about someone inventing a steam press in ancient Egypt, which is a half step away from steam-power generally. And then it speculated about the only reason he probably didn't innovate it into a steam engine (ships and trains) is that there was no need given the economic and social circumstances. When you have masses of slave labor hauling things around (as a labor system and a system of political control), a steam engine isn't just unnecessary, it's actually a threat to the whole social power-structure.
Another humbling thing to think about, on the other hand, is just how contingent the Enlightenment ideals (c. 1640s) actually were -- on which most of the modern world is built ... the scientific method & technology, secularism, democracy, liberalism. It really came out of a fortunate (or unfortunate if you're not a fan) mix of historical and social elements coming together ... the Westphalian system, a few key liberal monarchs, Newton's work, the acceleration of the colonial project...
Take a few pieces away (historically, I mean; we can't go back in time now) and we may have been stuck in the 1500s indefinitely. And I think it's really just those three things that really distinguishes our day to day life from the past most visibly: secularism, a sophisticated political system (liberal democratic), and the technology. It's a dramatic difference in some sense, but in another sense it's not like we experience the world radically different than the past. We just have lots of trappings that make it seem a lot shinier and pleasant to be around than we imagine the past to be.
DDL on 10/3/2010 at 14:54
Quote Posted by BrokenArts
They were far more intelligent than we give them credit for. I'd like to believe so anyway.
I think that's looking at it the wrong way. Genetically, nothing of any significance has changed since then: they were exactly as intelligent as we are (and exactly as stupid). Barring minor nutritional differences (possibly), there's nothing to say that an average ancient greek wasn't exactly as intelligent as an average modern greek. They simply had a less extensive knowledge-base to draw from, and we often seem to conflate knowledge with intelligence, when they're really quite separate. :)
casalor on 10/3/2010 at 15:24
DDL, before I got to the end of this thread that's almost exactly what I was going to say. Modern man appeared on the scene many thousands of years ago and we're pretty indistinguishable from them so I wondered if the relatively late - chronologically - flourish of technology and culture (which apparently makes us seem more intelligent) owes more to an increasing rate of population densities over the centuries and the fight for limited resources.
fett on 10/3/2010 at 15:29
Quote Posted by kabatta
Sounds interesting. From where did you get all that information?
I didn't really "get it" from anywhere - it's all over the place in archaeology and middle-eastern/Mesopotamian history circles as fairly common knowledge. I can't point to a single source that contains all that information though. Are you looking for a specific publication or something?
