• Glowstick@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The answer is probably language. Before advanced language was developed, there wasn’t a good way to pass along any knowledge that was gained by an individual.

    • sinkingship@mander.xyz
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      4 months ago

      I thought it was because proper farming.

      Like being able to support larger groups of people, where individuals could specialize in other things than hunting, gathering and whatever else was keeping the early humans busy.

      On the other hand I’ve heard we’ve been possibly farming long before 10,000 BCE.

    • loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Language probably predates Homo Sapiens as our close relatives such as Homo Neandertalensis and Homo Denisova also had adaptations for articulated speech.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01391-6

      Beside, populations today that have never had agriculture or traits we associate with civilization and who live secluded, like the North Sentinelese, all have languages.

      I think it’s best explained by environmental factors, rather than something interior to humanity. After all, most of human’s existence was during the Pleistocene, but all recorded history is within the Holocene (except now we’re entering the Anthropocene). Many modern studies account for the climate shifts to explain the development of agriculture:

      https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1113931109

      https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959683611409775

      Most traits we associate with civilization are linked to agriculture and sedentary.

    • Hegar@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      Language is much older than just 10k years. There’s a few reasons to think that language might have developed with erectus, which could make language 10x older than the ‘human specie’, according to anon.

      • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That’s why i said advanced language. Lots of animals have language. Crows have language

        • Hegar@fedia.io
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          4 months ago

          Usually the distinction is between “advanced communication” which some animals display, and “language”, which only humans have.

          Whether you want to call it language or advanced language, what we do today is way older than 10k years. There are stories that have been dated to 100k and if the arguments about erectus are correct, then what you call advanced language is probably 2m+ years old.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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      4 months ago

      As IoaExMachina correctly highlighted, language predates those 10k years.

      For reference, Proto-Afro-Asiatic (ancestor of Egyptian, all Semitic languages, Amazigh, plus a lot others) is believed to have been spoken 12k~18k years ago. So… like, it was already old back then, and yet it has modern descendants.

      And the role of language is probably not just communication, it’s also to formalise thought. It’s easier to think with language than without it, and you can reach more reliable conclusions.

    • superkret@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      The answer is agriculture, which lowered the standard of living and health of the individual, but sustained more people, allowed for specialization, permanent settlement and building large structures.