Razib's point about skill loss is interesting, because it goes beyond just what we colloquially understand as "skills". In the case of the longbow, you need to use certain muscles in a certain way that, if you don't develop them as a young man (from hours and hours of shooting - basically being Robin Hood in the forests of England), it's almost impossible to do so later.
The difficulty of developing skills is a reason the Germans were not as afraid of the U.S. entering WWII as they should have been. Germany was the center kf high-tech manufacturing at the time, and basically the only place that could make the lenses you need to do artillery with precision. They thought it would take us at least three years to develop the tech, before we could figure out how to manufacture it at scale, and by then they'd be done.
As we recently learned with China and AI (and Tik Tok/social media), it turns out that when you have the largest manufacturing and engineering base in the world (the peak or our workforce had come of age in "Newark makes, the world takes"), you can figure that shit out fast. They estimated it would take us years to get the lenses right; it ended up taking us 3 - 6 months, and within a couple of years our tanks, planes, and guns were whipping theirs back to the Rhine, those bastards.
Cultural skill inheritance did play roles in WWII though. Most simply, it's why the sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan was the southern religious character. When war broke out, we needed a lot of dudes who could shoot guns, quick. As Razib pointed out with the crossbow, modern technology is amazing at enabling unskilled men to become pretty good shooters quick, and our common military rifles performed very well on that score.
Sharpshooting is a bit different, however. You can develop it as a skill, but only to a point. And even that takes a lot of time - time our military didn't have. As the movie shows, having a sharpshooter attached to a unit makes a huge difference. If we could train them up in a few weeks or even months, versus months or years, it would make a huge difference.
Luckily we had a huge population of dudes who grew up traipsing about the woods shooting long guns at small varmints for hours everyday (our version of Robin Hood) in the rural south and Appalachia. It turned out learning to deadeye a squirrel at distance from the time you're 7 years old is a useful skill when we need to kill Nazis hiding in Medieval church towers, and thank goodness it was, those bastards.
Not one of my favorite episodes, from Ethan acting like he just took his first bong rip when talking about the subject to the guest being way too arrogant about the entire field of archaeology and that one day yet another type of study won’t come along and obliterate his conclusions. Also, Ethan saying “I’m descended from the Yanaya (spelling?)” as if it means anything at all is some real like “I just read Sapiens last week” energy.
I did have one physics class at the college level, but nothing really beyond that. But I’m just a guy trying to describe what he heard on a podcast where you seem to be so self-assured that you’re patrolling for what you presume to be elementary school intellects to kick sand in the face of.
there's a reason i'm self-assured. sometimes it's not rocket science.
it's fine you are obviously are not interested in the topic. but anyone who pokes around will see exactly why i'm so self-assured. data don't lie, and they all point in one direction
If the outcome of natural biological evolution requires at least 20,000 years to manifest itself, and human civilization only has 5,000 years history (200 or so with electricity)…would it be accurate to say the study of modern science today is being done by the brain of primitive man?
Thank you Ethan for bringing this to an audience not otherwise likely to come across it.
David Reich wrote an interesting book which, for me, did a good job summarizing the then state of what we have learned using ancient DNA in an easy to understand manner. I believe he mentions Razib. https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X
To the negative posters, you have it backwards. Much of what we understood the past to be was a product of mediocre deductive reasoning grounded in an incomplete record. (Much closer to reefer fueled dorm-room theorizing). The DNA gives us a picture more grounded in fact, and less in assumption.
I'm surprised and disapointed that only two people left comments and they were both negative. This was a good episode and an interesting topic (Razib's post on the same topic on his own Substack is even better).
The thing where hunter-gathers and farmers were living side-by-side for thousands of years without mixing genetically at all (not even through, shall-we-say "unfriendly" ways) was mind-blowing, as was the turn where all of the sudden the HG males take over.
We'll probably never know exactly how that happened, but the basic idea combined with an almost total lack of specifics inspires my imagination to fill in the blanks in dozens of different ways.
So many assumptions! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Too much “probably”. Also, it’s fine if we don’t know things. We don’t need an answer for every single detail of the past. It’s disheartening when things are forgotten, but it has little impact on what’s happening today.
I appreciate you having something different on the pod and hope you do more "unusual" ones in the future but I couldn't really get into this one. An overwhelming amount of information
We do actually have words for what are essentially rules of thumb, they’re called heuristics. But I do agree we’ve lost a lot through the optimization of modern engineering. As someone who works a lot with engineers I find their culture to be overwhelmingly conservative and devoid of the artistic ingenuity that brought us these magnificent structures that you were discussing
The idea that we are the “sons of the strong” is so self aggrandizing. Maybe the sons of the lucky is more appropriate. I know Nassim Taleb isn’t very culturally popular at the moment, but he’s a guy who also believes in the genetic version of history but wrote a book called fooled by randomness which is always a good read when you need to check your overly deterministic views on the world
Really loved this episode and wondered about any book/ reading suggestions there might be to follow up on early man that Khan or Strauss or others would know of and enjoyed
Is the collapse of this population related at all to the Bronze Age collapse? IIRC historians still don’t really know what lead to the Bronze Age civilizations crumble? Or am I mistaken about all of that?
Razib's point about skill loss is interesting, because it goes beyond just what we colloquially understand as "skills". In the case of the longbow, you need to use certain muscles in a certain way that, if you don't develop them as a young man (from hours and hours of shooting - basically being Robin Hood in the forests of England), it's almost impossible to do so later.
The difficulty of developing skills is a reason the Germans were not as afraid of the U.S. entering WWII as they should have been. Germany was the center kf high-tech manufacturing at the time, and basically the only place that could make the lenses you need to do artillery with precision. They thought it would take us at least three years to develop the tech, before we could figure out how to manufacture it at scale, and by then they'd be done.
As we recently learned with China and AI (and Tik Tok/social media), it turns out that when you have the largest manufacturing and engineering base in the world (the peak or our workforce had come of age in "Newark makes, the world takes"), you can figure that shit out fast. They estimated it would take us years to get the lenses right; it ended up taking us 3 - 6 months, and within a couple of years our tanks, planes, and guns were whipping theirs back to the Rhine, those bastards.
Cultural skill inheritance did play roles in WWII though. Most simply, it's why the sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan was the southern religious character. When war broke out, we needed a lot of dudes who could shoot guns, quick. As Razib pointed out with the crossbow, modern technology is amazing at enabling unskilled men to become pretty good shooters quick, and our common military rifles performed very well on that score.
Sharpshooting is a bit different, however. You can develop it as a skill, but only to a point. And even that takes a lot of time - time our military didn't have. As the movie shows, having a sharpshooter attached to a unit makes a huge difference. If we could train them up in a few weeks or even months, versus months or years, it would make a huge difference.
Luckily we had a huge population of dudes who grew up traipsing about the woods shooting long guns at small varmints for hours everyday (our version of Robin Hood) in the rural south and Appalachia. It turned out learning to deadeye a squirrel at distance from the time you're 7 years old is a useful skill when we need to kill Nazis hiding in Medieval church towers, and thank goodness it was, those bastards.
Not one of my favorite episodes, from Ethan acting like he just took his first bong rip when talking about the subject to the guest being way too arrogant about the entire field of archaeology and that one day yet another type of study won’t come along and obliterate his conclusions. Also, Ethan saying “I’m descended from the Yanaya (spelling?)” as if it means anything at all is some real like “I just read Sapiens last week” energy.
sounds like you don't know how science works. speaking of arrogant. 'obliterate' conclusions.
did you study it beyond elementary school?
I did have one physics class at the college level, but nothing really beyond that. But I’m just a guy trying to describe what he heard on a podcast where you seem to be so self-assured that you’re patrolling for what you presume to be elementary school intellects to kick sand in the face of.
there's a reason i'm self-assured. sometimes it's not rocket science.
it's fine you are obviously are not interested in the topic. but anyone who pokes around will see exactly why i'm so self-assured. data don't lie, and they all point in one direction
Razib-
If the outcome of natural biological evolution requires at least 20,000 years to manifest itself, and human civilization only has 5,000 years history (200 or so with electricity)…would it be accurate to say the study of modern science today is being done by the brain of primitive man?
Thank you Ethan for bringing this to an audience not otherwise likely to come across it.
David Reich wrote an interesting book which, for me, did a good job summarizing the then state of what we have learned using ancient DNA in an easy to understand manner. I believe he mentions Razib. https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X
To the negative posters, you have it backwards. Much of what we understood the past to be was a product of mediocre deductive reasoning grounded in an incomplete record. (Much closer to reefer fueled dorm-room theorizing). The DNA gives us a picture more grounded in fact, and less in assumption.
I'm surprised and disapointed that only two people left comments and they were both negative. This was a good episode and an interesting topic (Razib's post on the same topic on his own Substack is even better).
The thing where hunter-gathers and farmers were living side-by-side for thousands of years without mixing genetically at all (not even through, shall-we-say "unfriendly" ways) was mind-blowing, as was the turn where all of the sudden the HG males take over.
We'll probably never know exactly how that happened, but the basic idea combined with an almost total lack of specifics inspires my imagination to fill in the blanks in dozens of different ways.
So many assumptions! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Too much “probably”. Also, it’s fine if we don’t know things. We don’t need an answer for every single detail of the past. It’s disheartening when things are forgotten, but it has little impact on what’s happening today.
I appreciate you having something different on the pod and hope you do more "unusual" ones in the future but I couldn't really get into this one. An overwhelming amount of information
We do actually have words for what are essentially rules of thumb, they’re called heuristics. But I do agree we’ve lost a lot through the optimization of modern engineering. As someone who works a lot with engineers I find their culture to be overwhelmingly conservative and devoid of the artistic ingenuity that brought us these magnificent structures that you were discussing
The idea that we are the “sons of the strong” is so self aggrandizing. Maybe the sons of the lucky is more appropriate. I know Nassim Taleb isn’t very culturally popular at the moment, but he’s a guy who also believes in the genetic version of history but wrote a book called fooled by randomness which is always a good read when you need to check your overly deterministic views on the world
Really loved this episode and wondered about any book/ reading suggestions there might be to follow up on early man that Khan or Strauss or others would know of and enjoyed
Excellent episode!
Great episode
Is the collapse of this population related at all to the Bronze Age collapse? IIRC historians still don’t really know what lead to the Bronze Age civilizations crumble? Or am I mistaken about all of that?
There's no way I could construct a functional steam pump, LOL. And I know how internal combustion engines work!
I fucking loved this discussion, thank you both.