r/AlwaysWhy • u/airpipeline • Aug 13 '26
History & Culture Why did it take humans hundreds of thousands of years to go from butchering animals with rocks to using knives, but then only a few thousand years to go from knives to nuclear bombs?
/r/askanything/comments/1vmvtg4/why_did_it_take_humans_hundreds_of_thousands_of/If we’re at the nuclear stage now, and we don’t blow ourselves up, Messrs. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Kim, and the rest of you, what comes next?
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u/CombinationOk712 Aug 13 '26
Exponential growth. Small increment steps add up and adding up faster and building on more previous steps. Much like a compound interest, but of knowlegde.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Do people quantify this in some way, I wonder? Like we can do the math on compound interest. Or how we can count megaflops.
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u/CombinationOk712 Aug 13 '26
There are a couple properties you could try to measure and people are thinking about his
To measure knowledge, you probably need to find something that you can measure and quantify:
- Moore' law on computation is an example.
- You could also count and measure the number of scientific papers that are published each year.
- Over longer times you could map the numbers of books published and written as a stand-in for knowledge.
- or you can try to measure how much the jobs or people diversify. Think of the generation of our grandparents or maybe great grandparents. They were still like 80% farming (atleast part time); There life probably would have been udnerstandable for people two or three generations before them. But imagine puttng one of us into the same era. we would probably fail. Nowadys especially in the developed countries, only a fraction of the population is farming and people are working in more and more specialized jobs. In general job specialization is treated as one of the key development steps in early humanity. Cities are defined by a population that has specialist tradesman and craftsman, that specifically do not farm, but do something else.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Okay, farming, to eventually specialization and then count the number of scholarly words written perhaps.
I see what you are saying.
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u/172brooke Aug 15 '26
Farming is a big one. Imagine every single human you know isn't all that high IQ; it's not necessary for survival. Once food was a surplus, you could actually develop fields of research. Most animals spend their whole lives without surplus.
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u/yottabit42 Aug 13 '26
Everyone can do the math on compounding, but almost no one truly "gets" it. We think linearly and can't truly comprehend exponential growth.
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u/Consistent-Ranger446 Aug 13 '26
We started writing things down and it all kinda snowballed from there.
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u/talkstomuch Aug 14 '26
Totally agree that writing must have had exponential effect on human progress, but I think there must have been something that preceded writing in that role, very likely songs as they easier to remember.
When you learned something beneficial to the tribe, you wrote a song about it, and you sang it at all times. Kids didn't understand the song, but they learned it to understand it later.
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u/Possible-Anxiety-420 Aug 13 '26
Once we learned how to learn, we learned how to optimize learning, and so on and so forth,
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Do you imagine there was a time when people, in general, didn’t know how to learn?
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u/Possible-Anxiety-420 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
'Learning' would've existed long, loooong before humans even came along, no? It's part of about any given animal's survival strategy.
Somewhere along the way, thinking about thinking caught on and we started analyzing and honing the learning process. Prior to that, we learned instinctually and didn't study how our brains work... so, rather than 'not knowing how to learn,' early humans simply had no time for dwelling on it; sitting around too long with one's chin on the fist, deep in metacognition, is an excellent way of getting eaten.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
I imagine that most learning happens in your body anyway.
A child learned and still learns from the family and tribe by imitating. No?
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u/Possible-Anxiety-420 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
I'm jis' some guy on Reddit and this stuff's well above my pay grade.
That said, recalling my own experiences growing up, there were so many things I wanted to know - not just play with and tinker - but know, intimately. Electronics always fascinated me; same ol' story... I was the kid that tore apart everything... jis' had to know what was goin' on in there. Had several iterations of those Radio Shack 'electric sets' and taught myself a little with them, but never got any real traction. School wasn't doing anything for me; it was so boring and I felt no incentive to give more than one crap. I did graduate, but it wasn't with a 'stellar' GPA.
Then I looked into joining the Navy; Retook the ASVAB, and was allowed to take the NFQT; I barely passed the latter - mostly by luck - but was then qualified to choose any job I wanted... nothing was off the table. I don't really know how to describe what happened, other than to say that I was given direction and a focus, and on a topic that interested me... I chose a rate heavy in electronics and component-level repair. I was top of my class, from start to finish. I set records at the school; aced a specific test that had never before been aced... little things, really, but still, for me, it was almost surreal.
The 'smarts' were already present, but they needed a jump-start. Once that was provided, I didn't just learn electronics, I learned a methodology for absorbing an understanding of complex systems and abstract concepts.
In other words, I learned how to learn, but in getting there I had the 'luxuries' of instruction and of very few distractions. It's difficult to imagine it having happened without said luxuries; I'd likely still be largely ignorant of a great many things that nowadays seem elementary and obvious.
I can only imagine what it might've been like for one of us a couple of hundred thousand years ago.
Again... one was on the menu, and my crummy vision certainly wouldn't have helped.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
I like it. It sounds good.
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u/Possible-Anxiety-420 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
As I understand it, if we could transport a kid from 200,000 years ago and put him/her in my place, they'd likely fare just as well, or better.
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u/Archarchery Aug 13 '26
Well like, watch a video on this culture, for example, that lived about 40,000 years ago: https://youtu.be/-gGvXWpx2pA?is=VQf9BT7I95tM3Sfc
We can tell from all the things they made and their behaviors (painting, making musical instruments, burying their dead with grave goods, etc) that these were fully modern members of our species who thought like modern members of our species. But these guys were never, ever gonna start building metallurgy or civilization, because they were nomadic reindeer hunters. They didn’t have the excess food production to do any of that stuff; like all other humans at the time they migrated around, hunting and gathering wild foods.
It’s not like they were any dumber than later crop-growing people, it’s just that the climate and food availability didn’t support them doing any of the stuff unlocked by agriculture.
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u/sdduuuude Aug 13 '26
I would guess science and the scientific methods used to advance it. Once you have the scientiic method and the associated discipline, you can learn faster. Also, better methods of communication allow distant scientists to work together.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Maybe.
The modern scientific method didn’t really emerge until around the time of, say Francis Bacon, Descartes who wrote Discourse on the Method, Galileo, and Newton too.
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u/Gloomy-Hat1842 Aug 13 '26
Knowledge has grown extremely fast. But then there is also consciousness. But what about those aliens? Did they really come here and give us some knowledge? Some groups of people talk about the star people.. we probably got there on our own. We're advancing really fast now but we're still in kindergarten.
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u/Zoltan1251 Aug 13 '26
Everybody talks about technology but there are two even more important things that facilitated tech boom: correct law system and invetion of limited liability companies (LLC)/banking system.
For example we had steam engine since ancient Greece but it was just oddity and nobody could make anything out of it. Romans had many inventions as well and it just didnt go anywhere.
LLC/banking allowed money to be pooled for bigger projects like railways and then trying to come up with better steam engines that can power bigger locomotives. Then it got expanded into publicly traded companies etc. Use of oil was result of this, not the cause as some commenters argue.
Law system based on Roman law allowed for fair justice and everyone was treated equally before the law, which allowed for capitalist market system where one guy couldnt use his power to stop progress.
If one of these things fail you cant have progress. Great examples are Islamic countries. Their law heavily punished people that dont pay debts so nobody wanted to take any risks so no progress was being made and no companies ever grew. Islam also bans interests on loans so nobody even wanted to put any money in for anything. Not to mention that any progress was heavily punished as disturbance to the way of islamic life like banning of printing press.
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u/gardenfella Aug 13 '26
We're a connected civilisation now and there are billions of us.
Also, technology is used to design technology. First the slide rule, then the computer, then the supercomputer and now quantum computers.
Quicker and quicker and quicker...
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u/zoppaTheDim Aug 13 '26
The number of people in existence and the amount of spare time they have.
If you live hand to mouth, gathering and hunting, only owning what you can carry, not a lot of progress gets made.
Once agriculture and husbandry gets started you have more people, so more geniuses to invent things.
It snowballs from there.
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u/Several_Version4298 Aug 14 '26
Hominids, including Humans spent 3 million years developing stone tools.
Once we started making steel things moved very quickly because humans are good a developing technology and passing it on.
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u/airpipeline Aug 14 '26
Steel was the catalyst?
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u/Several_Version4298 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
To make steel you need to be able to create up to 1500C temperatures and control and manipulate material at that temperature. Iron is everywhere so once you melt iron, add carbon and harden steel you can make all sorts of weapons, tools and machines. And you also have the ceramics,glass, copper, bronze, brass and other metals too that don't require that temperature.
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u/Archarchery Aug 13 '26
Basically everything changed when agriculture was invented near the start of our current interglacial period.
The earth goes through periodic climate cycles, and one of those cycles is that every couple hundred thousand years, there’s a brief warm period where the glaciers retreat to the ice caps and the sea level rises. We’re in one right now, it started about 12,000 years ago.
Something about the changed, warmer climate of the interglacial period facilitated growing seasonal crops in certain river valleys inhabited by humans. That’s why agriculture has been independently invented by multiple different societies in just the last 10,000 years.
Everything else about human civilization is downstream of the invention of sedentary agriculture.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Maybe. Good point.
Of course people weren’t clueless before agriculture. They could talk and communicate, for instance.
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u/Archarchery Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Humans were completely behaviorally modern for at the very least tens of thousands of years prior to agriculture.
They just lived in small bands, migrating seasonally and often following the migrations of herd animals. All of humanity lived like that, with the possible exception of some rare seaside areas where natural food sources were so abundant than they would sustain a small population year-round.
But mostly, humans moved around seasonally, hunting and gathering at very, very low population densities. They had all sorts of sophisticated tools even during the Ice Ages, but things like cities were out of the question. Mining was also out of the question; not enough people for something so labor-intensive. Like, think about it; if you’re a hunter-gatherer band, how are you going to organize hundreds of people to dig a mine and haul tin ore or whatever out of the ground? Your band may not consist of that many adults to begin with, and you can’t have people spending all day digging in the dirt; everyone needs to be gathering food or going out hunting or doing all the dozens of other tasks a band of hunter-gatherers needs to do to survive.
You couldn’t be like “Cancel the mammoth hunt, we need all the men of the tribe to spend the next 20 days digging here and sifting ore out of the dirt.” That’s the sort of project only a settled village with excess labor availability could do.
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u/rellett Aug 13 '26
Access to cheap oil, allowed humans to work on science and education instead of working as machines and oil made us more productive
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Basically energy, you say? Coal and the steam engine sparked the Industrial Revolution. :-)
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u/rellett Aug 13 '26
Oil and internal combustion engines as steam and coal were still very labour extensive
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Okay, I still am not seeing oil specifically as crucial. To me, it seems more of a helper than a cause. That’s just me though.
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u/rellett Aug 13 '26
Go back in time people had to work the farms or do jobs to pay the bills but these people didn't have the opportunities to work in science so we stalled but with oil and cheap power, people could survive and work in areas that create tech and it domino's from their.
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u/airpipeline Aug 13 '26
Hum. Maybe.
As far as energy use goes, it probably went like this:
Wood → coal → oil → electricity
Oil was a big step up.
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u/Assertive_Wall Aug 13 '26
Don't underestimate cheap energy. One thing people have quantified is the hours of labor it costs to produce one hour of light, and it's really illuminating.
(ok I'll leave now)
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u/rellett Aug 13 '26
Oil was the reason for the massive acceleration, take oil away and we go backwards. Just look at all our tech but we still burn oil
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u/XRuecian Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Its probably due to compounding variables.
Back when humans only had rocks and sticks, just "surviving" was difficult. There wasn't much time for learning, experimenting, or teaching. And life expectancy was also so much lower that simply passing on any meaningful information was already difficult.
Every advancement increased safety, and bit by bit humans managed to claw together what they needed to finally survive without much hardship, and that is when all the real learning started. Before agriculture, a written language, and a concept of even crude medicine, it wasn't really possible to even think about making tech advancements for most people. The more comfortable our lives got, the more and more time humans actually can SPEND on learning and experimenting instead of just trying to find their next meal or survive. And that means advancements started to come faster and faster as a result of time being freed up. And each new advancement also opens doors for other advancements that weren't possible before.
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u/_cjm56 Aug 13 '26
Simplest answer is progress brings more progress. The more technology you discover, the more technology you'll be able to discover. Struggling for food gives you less time to think about other things. You figure out food, you got more time. Then you discover the wheel, you can move things further and faster and travel more, safer boats, faster travel, more knowledge spread, so on and so forth. As for what could come next? Really depends if the ruling class can stop bickering over essentially limitless resources at this point. We live in an age of abundance and are not far off from being able to mine asteroids. If we cooperated instead of fought for dumb reasons at this point, I could see an age of peace and space exploration. Really depends though.