It seems rather easy to mess with the inputs T. Weather conditions or continental drifts could confine pre-agricultural humans to hunting essentially indefinitely
This is sort of amazing, but after a couple million years of hunting and gathering humans developed agriculture independently within a few thousand years in multiple locations (the count is at least 7, possibly more).
This really doesn’t have a good explanation, it’s too ridiculous to be a coincidence, and there’s nothing remotely like a plausible common cause.
There’s a very plausible common cause. Humans likely developed the traits that allowed them to easily invent agriculture during the last glacial period. The glacial period ended 10 000 years ago, so that’s when the climate became amenable to agriculture.
This really doesn’t have a good explanation, it’s too ridiculous to be a coincidence, and there’s nothing remotely like a plausible common cause.
Odd. Last I checked there were a dozen or two prominent theories on this, and at least twice as many hypotheses in general as for why we would observe this. Most of these I find plausible, and rather adequate considering the amount of information we have.
One of my favorites is that long before this happened, some individuals learned how to do it, but could not transfer a sufficient portion of this knowledge to others, until selection effects made these individuals more frequent and improvements in communication crossed a threshold where it suddenly wasn’t so prohibitively expensive anymore to teach others how to plant seeds and make sure they grew into harvestable plants. Once evolution had done its job and most ancestors were now capable of transmitting enough knowledge between eachother to learn basic agriculture, it seems almost inevitable that over several dozen generations, for any select tribe, there will be at least one individual that stumbles upon this knowledge and eventually teaches it to the rest of the tribe.
Naturally, testing these hypotheses isn’t exactly easy, so one could reasonably claim that there is no “good” explanation here. However, I wouldn’t go cry “Amazing Anthropomorphic Coincidence That Trumps Great Filter!” at all either, as you say, and I’m not quite sure where you were going with this other than “oooh, shiny unanswered question!”, if anywhere.
All theories of emergence of agriculture I’m aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn’t develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving “selection effects” is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule—it’s second coming of “scientific racism”).
Should I take this to imply that what I learned in high school and wikipedia is wrong, or very poorly understood? From what I know, throughout the paleolithic populations started developing the knowledge and techniques for sedentary lifestyles, food preservation, and growing plants, while at the same time spreading out across the globe. Then came the end of the ice age, and these populations started slowly applying this knowledge at various points in time, with a difference in the 10^4 order of magnitude between the earliest and slowest populations.
That looks very much like the human species had “already been selected” before it was completely split into separate populations, though admittedly that alone as described in my previous comment isn’t enough to explain how close they came to one another on the timeline (I would have expected a variance of ~50-80k years or so, if that were the only factor, rather than 10-11k).
Edit: I only realized after posting both comments that I have a very derogatory / adversarial / accusational tone. This is not (consciously) intentional, and I’m really grateful you brought up this point. I’m learning a lot from these comments.
Backing up a step from this, actually… how confident are we of the “no contact with each other” condition?
Speaking from near-complete ignorance, I can easily imagine how a level of contact sufficiently robust to support “hey, those guys over there are doing this nifty thing where they plant their own food, maybe we could try that!” once or twice a decade would be insufficient to otherwise leave a record (e.g., no commerce, no regular communication, no shared language, etc.), but there might exist plausible arguments for eliminating that possibility.
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other’s technology if it wasn’t already similar to what they’ve been doing.
Agriculture probably initially expanded because farmers pressed north through the continent, not because hunter-gatherers adopted the practice on their own, Scandinavian scientists say.
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn’t spread, it’s a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
How does that reinforce Robin’s model? It goes against it if anything. Imagine if humans, dolphins, bats, bears, and penguins nearly simultaneously developed language on separate continents. It would be a major unexplained WTF.
You can start here, but Wikipedia has pretty bad coverage of that.
Robin’s model makes more sense if we think of it as “some process we don’t understand is behind all these repeated patterns”. If agriculture indeed arises at a specific point for reasons we don’t understand, it makes Robin’s model more likely—and it makes it harder for us to counterfactually mess with the data.
I think a good steel-man version of Robin’s model would start with a discussion of universality. I think I recall Robin having some thoughts along such lines, but I don’t know Kurweil well enough to know whether he invokes such things.
That wouldn’t make Robin’s model more counterfactually resilient—it would just provide more evidence for the model, thus pitting our understanding of universality directly against our understanding of history, evolution, economics, etc...
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying, but I think I agree with this. I guess I’m trying to flesh out the idea of “some process we don’t understand”, since Robin’s model seems to depend on it (as do things like Moore’s law, which is more strongly supported by the data).
If we do assume universality, counterfactual resiliency is still a useful method of analysis, and we can even further clarify the reasons why by pointing out that models of universal behaviour usually involve the aggregation of many small, mostly independent effects. However, some evidence against counterfactual resilience is weakened. For example, we could take the counterfactual that the Greeks had an industrial revolution, but we might not actually know how plausible that is. Models like Robin’s that conjecture universality would predict that there were reasons that that couldn’t have happened, so we need to be more familiar with the data before a claimed instance of nonresilience can really be considered good evidence against the model. Thus, the idea of universality allows us to more accurately evaluate the strength of arguments of this sort.
I think I agree with you—what I’m saying is that if we had evidence for universality or for Robin’s model, and we also had evidence that the Greek (or Chinese) industrial revolutions could have happened early, then we can now pit these two sources of evidence directly against each other...
Hmm, apparently ‘behavioural modernity’, ‘most recent common ancestor’ and ‘out of Africa’ are all around 50 000 years ago.
Until about 10 000 years ago a great deal of the world was under thick ice sheets, and probably a lot of the rest was cold, so there probably weren’t that many humans alive.
If you give each living person a tiny chance of ‘inventing agriculture’, then “multiple recent inventions thousands of years apart” sounds about right to me.
I realize that that’s a completely implausible model, but I’m not sure why a more realistic one would make it ‘too ridiculous to be a coincidence’, and if you require plant evolution as part of the scheme, that will push the expected dates later.
“Behavioural modernity” is a hypothesis which is very far from being universally accepted. Many features supposedly of behavioural modernity have some reasonable evidence of existence far earlier.
Any hypothesis linking behavioral modernity with language (the only plausible common cause) is on extremely shaky grounds since as far as we know Neanderthals had language just as well, and that pushes language to nearly 1mya.
Behavioural modernity without common cause like language, and without any definite characteristics that weren’t present earlier in some form is far less plausible, and pretty much falls apart.
Even starting count at 60kya, agriculture being invested 10kya multiple times independently is still extremely surprising.
Even disregarding admixtures with Neanderthals, Denisovans etc. most recent common ancestor is more like 140kya-200kya by mitochondrial and Y chromosome dating. Dating anything here is very dubious, so you can find a number that fits your hypothesis whatever your hypothesis might be.
At each point of history vast majority of humans lived in places very far from those covered by ice, or particularly cold. Agriculture was invented only in places far from ice. These are still climatic effects like rainfall that depend on glaciations, but these are much more tenuous links.
Modern attempts at domesticating plants and animals show it takes a few decades, not tens of thousands of years. Now these are done with benefit of modern science and technology, but still it doesn’t imply tens of thousands of years.
Agriculture developed in some places very soon after human settlement, like maize and potato agriculture, so that’s another argument against requiring thousands of years of plant evolution.
If it took plants and animals tens of thousands of years on average, then surely there would be a huge spread in time of domestication. Instead we have an extremely quick succession of domestication events even more ridiculous than the original coincidence (since now number of events is not 7+, it’s 100+).
This is sort of amazing, but after a couple million years of hunting and gathering humans developed agriculture independently within a few thousand years in multiple locations (the count is at least 7, possibly more).
This really doesn’t have a good explanation, it’s too ridiculous to be a coincidence, and there’s nothing remotely like a plausible common cause.
There’s a very plausible common cause. Humans likely developed the traits that allowed them to easily invent agriculture during the last glacial period. The glacial period ended 10 000 years ago, so that’s when the climate became amenable to agriculture.
Yes, I had always assumed that was the cause. (Which might have some kind of bearing on Great Filter-like reasonings.)
Agriculture developed very far from regions most affected by glaciation, and in very diverse climates, so any climatic common cause is pretty dubious.
Odd. Last I checked there were a dozen or two prominent theories on this, and at least twice as many hypotheses in general as for why we would observe this. Most of these I find plausible, and rather adequate considering the amount of information we have.
One of my favorites is that long before this happened, some individuals learned how to do it, but could not transfer a sufficient portion of this knowledge to others, until selection effects made these individuals more frequent and improvements in communication crossed a threshold where it suddenly wasn’t so prohibitively expensive anymore to teach others how to plant seeds and make sure they grew into harvestable plants. Once evolution had done its job and most ancestors were now capable of transmitting enough knowledge between eachother to learn basic agriculture, it seems almost inevitable that over several dozen generations, for any select tribe, there will be at least one individual that stumbles upon this knowledge and eventually teaches it to the rest of the tribe.
Naturally, testing these hypotheses isn’t exactly easy, so one could reasonably claim that there is no “good” explanation here. However, I wouldn’t go cry “Amazing Anthropomorphic Coincidence That Trumps Great Filter!” at all either, as you say, and I’m not quite sure where you were going with this other than “oooh, shiny unanswered question!”, if anywhere.
All theories of emergence of agriculture I’m aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn’t develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving “selection effects” is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule—it’s second coming of “scientific racism”).
Hmm. The more you know.
Should I take this to imply that what I learned in high school and wikipedia is wrong, or very poorly understood? From what I know, throughout the paleolithic populations started developing the knowledge and techniques for sedentary lifestyles, food preservation, and growing plants, while at the same time spreading out across the globe. Then came the end of the ice age, and these populations started slowly applying this knowledge at various points in time, with a difference in the 10^4 order of magnitude between the earliest and slowest populations.
That looks very much like the human species had “already been selected” before it was completely split into separate populations, though admittedly that alone as described in my previous comment isn’t enough to explain how close they came to one another on the timeline (I would have expected a variance of ~50-80k years or so, if that were the only factor, rather than 10-11k).
Edit: I only realized after posting both comments that I have a very derogatory / adversarial / accusational tone. This is not (consciously) intentional, and I’m really grateful you brought up this point. I’m learning a lot from these comments.
Backing up a step from this, actually… how confident are we of the “no contact with each other” condition?
Speaking from near-complete ignorance, I can easily imagine how a level of contact sufficiently robust to support “hey, those guys over there are doing this nifty thing where they plant their own food, maybe we could try that!” once or twice a decade would be insufficient to otherwise leave a record (e.g., no commerce, no regular communication, no shared language, etc.), but there might exist plausible arguments for eliminating that possibility.
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other’s technology if it wasn’t already similar to what they’ve been doing.
See this for example:
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn’t spread, it’s a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
(nods) Yup, if that theory is true, then the observed multiple distinct onset points of agriculture becomes more mysterious.
Interesting! That certainly reinforces Robin’s model. Do you have source for that?
How does that reinforce Robin’s model? It goes against it if anything. Imagine if humans, dolphins, bats, bears, and penguins nearly simultaneously developed language on separate continents. It would be a major unexplained WTF.
You can start here, but Wikipedia has pretty bad coverage of that.
Robin’s model makes more sense if we think of it as “some process we don’t understand is behind all these repeated patterns”. If agriculture indeed arises at a specific point for reasons we don’t understand, it makes Robin’s model more likely—and it makes it harder for us to counterfactually mess with the data.
I think a good steel-man version of Robin’s model would start with a discussion of universality. I think I recall Robin having some thoughts along such lines, but I don’t know Kurweil well enough to know whether he invokes such things.
That wouldn’t make Robin’s model more counterfactually resilient—it would just provide more evidence for the model, thus pitting our understanding of universality directly against our understanding of history, evolution, economics, etc...
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying, but I think I agree with this. I guess I’m trying to flesh out the idea of “some process we don’t understand”, since Robin’s model seems to depend on it (as do things like Moore’s law, which is more strongly supported by the data).
If we do assume universality, counterfactual resiliency is still a useful method of analysis, and we can even further clarify the reasons why by pointing out that models of universal behaviour usually involve the aggregation of many small, mostly independent effects. However, some evidence against counterfactual resilience is weakened. For example, we could take the counterfactual that the Greeks had an industrial revolution, but we might not actually know how plausible that is. Models like Robin’s that conjecture universality would predict that there were reasons that that couldn’t have happened, so we need to be more familiar with the data before a claimed instance of nonresilience can really be considered good evidence against the model. Thus, the idea of universality allows us to more accurately evaluate the strength of arguments of this sort.
I think I agree with you—what I’m saying is that if we had evidence for universality or for Robin’s model, and we also had evidence that the Greek (or Chinese) industrial revolutions could have happened early, then we can now pit these two sources of evidence directly against each other...
Hmm, apparently ‘behavioural modernity’, ‘most recent common ancestor’ and ‘out of Africa’ are all around 50 000 years ago.
Until about 10 000 years ago a great deal of the world was under thick ice sheets, and probably a lot of the rest was cold, so there probably weren’t that many humans alive.
If you give each living person a tiny chance of ‘inventing agriculture’, then “multiple recent inventions thousands of years apart” sounds about right to me.
I realize that that’s a completely implausible model, but I’m not sure why a more realistic one would make it ‘too ridiculous to be a coincidence’, and if you require plant evolution as part of the scheme, that will push the expected dates later.
Some counterpoints:
“Behavioural modernity” is a hypothesis which is very far from being universally accepted. Many features supposedly of behavioural modernity have some reasonable evidence of existence far earlier.
Any hypothesis linking behavioral modernity with language (the only plausible common cause) is on extremely shaky grounds since as far as we know Neanderthals had language just as well, and that pushes language to nearly 1mya.
Behavioural modernity without common cause like language, and without any definite characteristics that weren’t present earlier in some form is far less plausible, and pretty much falls apart.
Migration out of Africa is dated at anywhere between 125kya and 60kya, not 50kya.
Even starting count at 60kya, agriculture being invested 10kya multiple times independently is still extremely surprising.
Even disregarding admixtures with Neanderthals, Denisovans etc. most recent common ancestor is more like 140kya-200kya by mitochondrial and Y chromosome dating. Dating anything here is very dubious, so you can find a number that fits your hypothesis whatever your hypothesis might be.
At each point of history vast majority of humans lived in places very far from those covered by ice, or particularly cold. Agriculture was invented only in places far from ice. These are still climatic effects like rainfall that depend on glaciations, but these are much more tenuous links.
Modern attempts at domesticating plants and animals show it takes a few decades, not tens of thousands of years. Now these are done with benefit of modern science and technology, but still it doesn’t imply tens of thousands of years.
Agriculture developed in some places very soon after human settlement, like maize and potato agriculture, so that’s another argument against requiring thousands of years of plant evolution.
If it took plants and animals tens of thousands of years on average, then surely there would be a huge spread in time of domestication. Instead we have an extremely quick succession of domestication events even more ridiculous than the original coincidence (since now number of events is not 7+, it’s 100+).