I always wonder about the intellectual capacity of these early humans. If you went back in time and snatched a cavebaby how would it be different from modern humans once grown?
I mean, that mostly depends if it's a Homo Sapiens or not.
It's just wild that humans spent the better part of 2 million years banging rocks together and in the space of like 6,000 years we've gone from rocks to lasers.
it is incredible what the evolution of language has accomplished
Except that's not the case at all. Humans only developed farming when it became necessary and civilization can't exist if you don't settle down from hunting and gathering. But in that time there were probably countless primitive inventions and discoveries that simple weren't written down or there are no longer any remains of.
Just look at the history of mathematics. We've been mapping the stars with incredible accuracy for as far back as we can find evidence of. And the concepts of number, magnitude, and geometry have been around since humanity has been on the planet. Every language we've ever known to exist has numbers in it.
Hell, the Ishango bone is a tally of prime numbers and it's more than 20,000 years old.
Farming and language is what got humanity into space, not just intelligence.
According to the article
"The excavation proves early humans colonised the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, though it is thought these hominims, or ‘Hobbits’, pre-date modern humans, known as homosapiens."
So we're talking about Homo floresiensis. Now, trying to wean out anything about intelligence from fossils is really fucking hard, but they did have much smaller brains than modern humans.
Had to have been smart enough to successfully hunt a rhino at the least.
And know how to disassemble it for consumption.
That one's hardly difficult
Still, big difference between a butchered rhino and one eaten by wild animals, say a pack of wolves.
Given how shit humans are at eating things, and how much we kinda can't eat, it does require a fair level of knowledge.
Fuck yeah, hobbits used to live in my region
Brain size has been repeatedly shown to be meaningless when determining intelligence in animals. Hell, Neanderthals had larger brains than us but were definitely not as smart as us.
Another great example is birds: they have some of the smallest brains for their size of all the chordates, yet they are easily some of the most intelligent.
What I mean is it's incredible how long humanity at large spent in a primitive state while having the theoretical capacity to be so much more - the long bouts of overall stagnation interrupted by some individual having a good idea until those good ideas finally piled up over time and fit together in a way that allowed the technological explosion that got us here, things like that blow my mind.
Technology moves a lot faster when you can have people sit around and try to figure out how to do really specific things all day instead of trying to not die.
Also helps to get a collection of minds together to work on solving an issue instead of one individual.
Farming allowed larger populations to collect with one another, which in turn helped them build upon each other's ideas. Advances in basic transportation, such as domesticating a horse or inventing the wheeled cart also helps ideas spread quicker.
Its crazy when you realize we're still in the midst of a revolution that has and will continue to greatly revolutionize how quickly we progress: the internet.
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