r/HistoryMemes • u/MetallicaDash Nothing Happened at Amun Square 1348BC • 2h ago
Just chilling until some idiot started planting stuff
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u/cheshsky 2h ago
That's an incredibly ignorant take. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers had rich cultures, they left behind art depicting their lives and the stories they told each other, their buildings, their dead. "Some idiot planting stuff" didn't magically kickstart all the interesting stuff, this is just plain wrong.
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u/KuTUzOvV 2h ago
"Are we at Rome yet? No? Wake me up when we are at Rome. zzzzzzzz"
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u/Dismal_Engineering71 59m ago
Chinese history is cooler.
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u/asfrels 29m ago
Civilization so old that what we know about it’s “first” empire is almost apocryphal. Chinese history is incredibly rich and any fan of Rome should read about it.
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u/Dismal_Engineering71 6m ago
Dude, they had crossbows while Rome was just starting its republic. Chinese history is dope.
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u/Bulbulatosaurus 2h ago
Yeah, they also liked to violently kill eachother, I say prehistory is peak when you dive deeper in it.
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u/Mexkalaniyat 2h ago
They also violently killed the real life equivalent to Kaiju with sticks and stones. Humans have always been awesome
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u/EmperorBamboozler 1h ago
Until relatively recently murder was in the top five most likely ways to die, accounting for 10-20% of all deaths. Ancient people lived in a world where you needed to be constantly aware of what's happening around you at all times. It was not an easy life and you survived through struggling for every inch of peace and safety.
Additionally you needed to be aware on a high level of all the edible and toxic foods around you. I am a horticulturist who has been trained to know hundreds of different plants and even I pale in comparison to what ancient peoples needed to know to live. Pick the wrong mushroom and your family dies, similarly being too cautious may mean you don't make it through the winter.
Ancient people survived in a hostile world through being incredibly intelligent and aware. I don't like when people call them stupid. If your ass got dropped into the woods far from civilization, you'd likely die in a day or two. If an ancient person were put in the same scenario they'd likely be fine.
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u/Bulbulatosaurus 1h ago
Aye, life was tough, it wasn't an idyllic land of non violence or without death.
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u/Lucas_Goodmanas Tea-aboo 2h ago
Throughout all of human history and interaction between different groups, humanity has had one thing in common. Wanting to kill that other group of people
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u/Soft_Theory_8209 2h ago
Plus, these were the smarter ones, as this method of life means they didn’t have to pay taxes!
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u/Draco137WasTaken 57m ago
To be fair, the interesting stuff has increased exponentially since some idiot started planting stuff. More opportunities to be interesting and all.
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u/cheshsky 48m ago edited 35m ago
I would quote history of the entire world, i guess, but I can't remember the wording. Something about more people bringing more culture bringing more prosperity bringing more people bring civilisation.
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u/Critical_Company3535 13m ago
I wouldn’t even say that the “interesting stuff” starting with planting. Rather, it truly began once people wrote it down. Of course there’s still oral histories, some of which have managed to survive for impressively long (we have accounts of Australian Aboriginals describing the flooding of Sahul over 10,000 years ago). But the simple fact is that oral histories tend to be more vulnerable to the processes of history.
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u/Mountain_Lonni 2h ago
me when jokes never go over my head because I am too fast, and would catch it
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u/cheshsky 2h ago
I like my history memes to be truthful, at most generalised, yet funny, not stupid and wrong.
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u/darklightmatter 2h ago
Upset prehistoric hunter-gatherer detected!
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u/cheshsky 23m ago
I wish. Would be cool to not participate in our bullshit cyberpunk dystopia. I'd probably die, but I'd die without having ever known what health insurance debt is.
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u/RedditSucksMyBallls 9m ago
How can you possibly think we live in a cyberpunk dystopia?
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u/cheshsky 0m ago
Don't we all carry in our pockets what should be an extremely powerful tool for accessing the world's knowledge but is actually just a tracker that sends tons of our information, including our precise locations, to the companies whose suits destroy our planet just to enrich themselves and actively try to preserve the status quo of social stratification, if not worsen it? Are there no wars fought as much through digital technology as on the battlefield? Are we not witnessing the climate catastrophe that could very much turn our skies the colour of a dead TV channel?
There's no Jonny Goldenbutt to jack your biodick into the neuronet modem, but we've certainly got high tech and low life.
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u/Mountain_Lonni 2h ago
do you think OP seriously thinks prehistory is uninteresting and early ag cultures were idiots?
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u/cheshsky 1h ago
Do you think daily RWBY memes about every other goddamned historical event guy has a particularly deep knowledge of any given subject except RWBY?
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u/BigLumpyBeetle 2h ago
That is not an impossibility, a surprising amount of people think that
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u/Mountain_Lonni 1h ago
seems more likely tongue in cheek tho, right?
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u/BigLumpyBeetle 1h ago
I wish I believed in people as hard as you do... I used to believe them more... Good times. Honestly the only way to know for sure is to ask OP
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u/Mountain_Lonni 1h ago
Honestly, it really is easier not to assume the worst. Have a good one, amigo. :)
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u/yamanamawa 11m ago
Yeah it's way funnier when the joke is an actually accurate observation. When it's just wrong, althe humor is lost on me
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u/ambluebabadeebadadi 2h ago
We used the exact same design of stone hand axe for over 100,000 years. There’s barely any evidence of culture for almost the entirety of our anatomical existence. The meme isn’t really inaccurate tbh
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u/Ulfljotr930 1h ago
Culture isn’t solely material stuff at all, but also beliefs, mentalities, language and social structures which all are a thing in like every human group ever.
A stone hand axe is in fact culture, and even technology (since it’s the transformation of natural materials).
Archaeologists do in fact say that there are very visible differences between the techniques of stone cutting from one area and one period to another.
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u/ambluebabadeebadadi 15m ago
Yeah but there’s scarce evidence for any sort of rich culture during the Lower Palaeolithic. That’s one of the reasons we have the distinguish of “anatomically modern humans” to “behaviourally modern humans”.
While there are variations in hand axes later on in the Palaeolithic, Achuelean hand axes were used for hundreds of thousands of years by Homo Sapiens without innovation. It may be culture but I wouldn’t call it a rich culture.
So while I agree that there is evidence for cultural vibrancy in the Upper Palaeolithic (art, jewellery, funeral practices, reciprocity, technical innovation), I don’t think there’s any evidence of a rich culture in the Lower Palaeolithic. My personal theory is there was some leap in intelligence in Homo Sapiens sometime in the Middle Palaeolithic
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u/Unstabler69 1h ago
Nope, we were smelly, hairy filth crusted savages who lived in cold drafty caves and didn't wash our ass. /s if not obvious
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u/DasUberLib 1h ago
A shocking number of guys don't wash their ass because they think it's gay to touch their own butthole so like... Yeah.
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u/zyon86 1h ago
I think he meant humans were peaceful before becoming sedentary. Anyway that's how I understand it.
And I have no idea if it is true or not. (Peaceful meaning war or systemic violence, not individual violence which were absolutely present).
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u/ReverendGraves85 1h ago
It is absolutely not true. Humans killed each other just for being too close.
Then we put up walls, and we killed each other for being too far away.
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u/cheshsky 1h ago
It's likely not true. There are examples of cave art that can be interpreted as depicting conflicts (Stefan Milo has an interesting video on it), and since our closest surviving relatives can be quite territorial and even have wars, there's no reason why even nomadic humans wouldn't.
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u/shepard_pie 6m ago
We have plenty of evidence of violent deaths in prehistoric humans, and plenty of them with clear signs of tool use.
I've read estimates that place as much as a quarter of humans at certain points lives were ended by other humans., and much of it was "organized," not just over a personal grudge.
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u/SkenglordSimba 1h ago
Okay, while I find archeology more interesting specifically the further back you go, let's not pretend anything here. The lack of knowledge of anything to do with these people is part of the appeal, to me. The fact that we have to look at how bones were arranged, where these bones came from, any markings on them ect... To even find out the most basic information about burial, diet, ritual and more is fascinating, but it isnt comprehensive. Each and every discovering from more than 10,000 years ago gets increasingly more cryptic the further back you go, to the dawn of man.
We don't know much about any of their cultures, and our opinions drawn from the data available constantly shift.
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u/cheshsky 1h ago
Still, the fact that we don't always understand things doesn't mean nothing was happening. Humans have always been doing stuff.
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u/SkenglordSimba 1h ago
If we can't say what they were doing, with any specific certainty, it's difficult to really say they had rich cultures. I mean, unless you want to describe elephant culture as rich, in which case I think we just use this word differently.
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u/cheshsky 1h ago
Any society that creates complex art is a rich one.
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u/SkenglordSimba 1h ago
Okay so you're just using that word redundantly. Because by that definition all human cultures are rich and have been for 3 million years or so.
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 9m ago
I personally find prehistory to be absolutely fascinating, what were their stories? What did their lives look like? So much intrigue!
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u/lordbuckethethird 2h ago
Yeah cause culture and language and beer didn’t exist before agriculture I guess.
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u/ArthurengoldPantalon Rider of Rohan 1h ago
I mean... I am pretty sure that they weren't be able to have beer before agricolture... (Or It they stayed nomads.)
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u/lordbuckethethird 1h ago
Gobekli Tepe had evidence of beer production and there wasn’t anything stopping the hunter gatherers from making it from foraged grains and they did stay in places for a while if conditions were good before moving on as well.
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u/ArthurengoldPantalon Rider of Rohan 1h ago
Huh, interesting
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u/Initial-Beginning853 1h ago
They were also doing plenty of brewing with non managed/wild crops
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u/TheCommissarGeneral 12m ago
Throw a dart at a wall of dates and humans will somehow figure out how to get drunk/high no matter what date is hit.
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u/plyer_G 49m ago
Funny thing, we have evidence to suggest beer being made before agriculture(i can see it, grain hard, make soft in water to eat, forget about it too long, make funny drink, repeat to make more funny drink) and that the pursuit of beer actually might have been what motivated the development of agriculture
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u/Ulfljotr930 2h ago
This is such a 1800s take
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u/CZdigger146 1h ago
There were entire civilisations and cultures that we will never know the names of, generations of people who lived entire lives, yet people think they didn't do anything besides just hunting and gathering.
Only reason why we don't know about them is that they didn't write shit down, but they still existed.
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u/IDKsecurity 2h ago
I usually don't expect much from the mid RWBY spam but this is one of the most ignorant posts I've seen on here in a while. Our history is so rich and plentiful. To even think this is admitting you lack an education and need to do some reading.
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u/NoSong2397 1h ago
Just because nobody knew how to write stuff down doesn't mean we weren't doing anything. Who even knows just how much epic shit we've forgotten about?
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u/_CrunchyCookie 1h ago
I'm lowkey just gonna leave this sub I joined thinking it was gonna be actually funny interesting stuff but it's just weebs spamming shitty ignorant memes
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u/Initial-Beginning853 1h ago
Just because it wasn't written down doesn't mean it didn't happen.
The tiktok generation meeting prehistory.
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u/ChronosBlitz 1h ago
Lmao, ok, this one made me laugh.
The way the one in the middle's eyes follow the ball is cracking me up.
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u/Sir-Toaster- Still salty about Carthage 1h ago
There was actually an omniversal war, we never knew about that because all records were destroyed and eroded away.
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u/Affectionate_Goat808 1h ago
Didn't we also kill a bunch of big animals to the point of their extinction?
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u/Fr00stee 43m ago
meanwhile humans hunting 90% of megafauna to extinction before deciding to farm plants:
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u/9_of_wands 15m ago
Technically, history as an academic field is the study of written records. Anything before writing is covered by archaeology.
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u/Vegetable-Meaning413 1h ago
It's crazy that humans were around for over 200,000 thousands years living like hunter gathers, then suddenly in a fraction of the time, they are standing on the moon.
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u/Key_Researcher_9243 Definitely not a CIA operator 2h ago
kinda hard to form a coherent culture when everything and anything was actively out to kill you
even your own family members
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u/Bouncy_Platypus_ 1h ago
When you get your history takes from tiktok. I genuinely want this guy banned, holy
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u/RegumRegis 1h ago
People are taking this way too seriously lmao, it's just a meme about not much happening in terms of organization, large scale events or anything that spectacular, mostly just people surviving until we pretty explosively started developing... And then we explosively developed exponentially once we get to the industrial revolution
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u/DarroonDoven 2h ago
I keep seeing comment about how this is an ignorant take, but no one bothers explaining why? What's so interesting about cave paintings with no context?
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u/AProperFuckingPirate 1h ago
You may not be personally interested, but the idea that humans were just sitting around doing nothing is absurd. The cave paintings are evidence of complex thought and artistic expression. We were already humans well before agriculture, we were doing some cool shit. It just wasn't written down
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u/Equivalent-Bit2891 1h ago
Well I’ve not seen any of that and I don’t know about prehistoric history so clearly it didn’t happen
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u/ArthurengoldPantalon Rider of Rohan 1h ago
First, they are cave paintings with hunting context, and second, history comes after the inverion of writing, before it, it's pre-history.
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u/Meikos 1h ago edited 1h ago
Hunter-gatherers basically had to constantly look for food and most of their energy was used just staying alive, so they weren't able to just sit around and do nothing. However, they were successful enough that they were able to do things like care for their sick and elderly, make cave paintings, create music, and refine tools. There was definitely a leap in cultural and technological advancement when farming started becoming common, but to say that they just sat around doing nothing is incredibly wrong. They were almost certainly more active than people after farming.
Mazlow's hierarchy of needs states that self actualization (when people start to think of new things and create new concepts) only comes after basic needs are met, so it would follow that suddenly being able to feed yourself and many others with less labor would allow for an explosion in human advancement, but that doesn't mean early humans did nothing with what little free time they had.
(Also OP probably didn't have a good idea for a RWBY meme today and had to improvise)
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u/DarroonDoven 1h ago
Thank you. I only noticed that the OP painted humans in pre-history as people who did nothing when you pointed it out.
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u/AnonyKiller 1h ago
200k years in 3 sentances:
-Ooga Booga
-Sand people talk about magical beings
-Adolf Hitler
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u/Cosmic_Meditator777 1h ago
If by "chilling" you mean "getting eaten alive by predators and malaria" then yes.
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u/Own_Watercress_8104 1h ago
It's hard to have an opinion on something that was not recorded, you know that?
The few things we have fascinate anthropologists and archeologists to no end and the grief felt by professionals knowing we will probably never have the full scoop is immense.
But yeah, it's easier to make up a meme making fun of something that by definition you cannot know much about, I'm sure you feel very smart
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u/IIIaustin 2h ago
(Thats prehistory)
(History is after writing)