an interesting time to be alive

[Waves]

remember, im talking strictly in terms of creating weapons designed to kill other humans. weapons designed for hunting animals and tools and such are a different story.

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by Waves

no offense but this barely makes sense

do you really think we've only been around for 3000 years?

i meant to say -3000 b.c.we've been around for about 5,000 some odd years

[JcP]

^^ that's not much better, man.

Anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by JcP

^^ that's not much better, man.

Anatomically modern humans first appear in the fossil record in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

yeah i know, they have that one named lucy or some shit, but civilation proper has only been around for 5,000or so years, before that, i' say we were sharing a chromosone with an ape like mammal that wasnt a monkey, and wasnt fully human either...written records(aside from egyptian heiroglyphics) probably started around 5,000 years ago.....im not talking about nomadic herds of homo-erectus, im talking about people like moses, abraham, etc.. now granted, they could be ficticious, but thats when time started being kept....the old testament dates back to a few thou b.c. i know that, but those were proper people..not unlike todays human..

[tedkennedy]

Originally Posted by Waves

remember, im talking strictly in terms of creating weapons designed to kill other humans. weapons designed for hunting animals and tools and such are a different story.

well yea humans didnt invent the bow or the atlat specifically for killing humans.
they just wanted a new hunting tool that just so happened to revolutionize the way they lived... the implications of killing at a distance are huge, no other animals can kill as efficiently as a human can.

edit: think about humanity hundreds and thousands of years ago. it was an extremely hostile place with constant human on human violence. what do you think has changed from then and now? why is there so much less violence and so much more innovation? are modern people all of a sudden not prone to violence? why do you think in a matter of a few hundred years all of a sudden humans just became super peaceful, super industrious and innovative people? please attempt to provide a decent alternate theory.

Originally Posted by Waves

you really believe that?

why is it so hard to believe exactly?

[OldMan&TheWeed]

Originally Posted by Waves

I also find this hilarious. So since we've had the same cognitive abilities for thousands of years that means that we should also have the same technology? i dont understand.

I think a possible answer to this may lie in the bottleneck hypothesis.

Population bottleneck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by tedkennedy

well yea humans didnt invent the bow or the atlat specifically for killing humans.
they just wanted a new hunting tool that just so happened to revolutionize the way they lived... the implications of killing at a distance are huge, no other animals can kill as efficiently as a human can.

edit: think about humanity hundreds and thousands of years ago. it was an extremely hostile place with constant human on human violence. what do you think has changed from then and now? why is there so much less violence and so much more innovation? are modern people all of a sudden not prone to violence? why do you think in a matter of a few hundred years all of a sudden humans just became super peaceful, super industrious and innovative people? please attempt to provide a decent alternate theory.

why is it so hard to believe exactly?

the answer is easy: less work, more gain.. nowdays people can just go to a mickey d's when they're hungry...theres no killing your own footd just to feed a family of 4, when its easier to have it prepared for you, or buy the goods at a supermarket. Even as recent as the 1800's they had outlaws wearing their revolver, but society rejected them and a more subtle approach was taken. If you think about it, a gun is the ultimate equalizer...people (most) realized it was more prudent to handle a situation with minimal bloodshed..Even today, there are nut jobs like that kid at VT who are a ticking time bomb.

Technology also played a huge role in taming man. Instead of roaming the streets on foot, you can drive to your destination almost instantly.Like I said in my previous message, we are accelerating the weapons/technology in use today too far, too fast. In WWII the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki devastated many lives, and took years to catch back up with the rest of the world. We have bombs 1000 times as powerful as the 1's dropped on Japan....If we used 1 of them, it would create a domino effect, and the whole globe would be a nuclear wasteland..nobody wants that. People need to eat, sleep, re-produce,and shit. Thats all we need, the rest is just programmed in as a child growing up. He sees what his parents are doing, and eventually he will become that man he saw as a child growing up..
and yes the human man is prone to violence, kinda like watching two roosters in front of a hen. They have the instinct to show her how tough he is, and vice versa, they'll fight untill someone wins her..to go from the time of Jesus and the king of the roman empire, to present day society is 2000 years. Imagine in 100 a.d. thru 1000 a.d.not much changed maybe architecture and styles, but no major advancements technologically except maybe a rudimentary catapult, and armor. From 1000 A.D. to the late 1700's, things began to quicken. After trading land through losing battles, each Army began to 1 up the other to insure victory..

After the conflict in Vietnam, Americans began to open their eyes, and drive more efficient vehicles. All of a sudden what previously would have been a 4 or 5 month boat trip, it becam possible to fly across the ocean in a matter of hours..Now that we were born in this period of time, we take it for granted. What was only a dream became the norm. Taken for granted....Thats why we were hit so hard on 9/11..if you watch that Zeitgeist link you will get a better understanding...Now I fully believe that the so called '''Illuminati" had a role they played very well. You know the saying "The rich get richer, etc." If you travel to a poor country, you'll have kids begging literally grabbing on to you asking for money...I don't know about you, but I see death as the next logical progression, and depending how how made others feel in this world, is how you will be judged. Killing ANYTHING in this mortal coil is something we do not & should not have the right to do. The acceleration of technology, having sex (reproduction), & man's need to satiate his blood thirsty appettite are all going to come to a violent head, then the bible states there will be 1,000 years of peace after the final battle....I believe we are in that battle as I type this message....Expect worse things than prior events, such as the WTC, VA TECH, etc... man is a cognitive of his abilities starting as young as 13. I have a 13 year old son now (as of April 15 he turned 13) and I remember being 13, and whats on his mind. He's at an age where all he has to do is go to school, and worry about the now.. the future will come, in time, but now he doesn't have any worries....I'm afraid all that is going to change within the next couple years. We have a corrupt Government (why wont they release the footage of a security tape on 9/11) it shows in plain view no plane hitting it, and it being destroyed by strategically placed explosives that only an experienced demo man could have pulled off....

To sum it up, Ted, we are no more peaceful than our spear-chucking forebearers..whether it be by gunshot, or poison ricin attacks by the crazed Japanese cult, I see a marked improvement on how we kill, why? Because we are able to. Whether it be for financial reasons, religous brainwashing, or just inherent evilness..

I ususllt don't smoke pot, but my boy got me a lump of hash im finsta hit it up in a few

[Waves]

Originally Posted by tedkennedy

well yea humans didnt invent the bow or the atlat specifically for killing humans.
they just wanted a new hunting tool that just so happened to revolutionize the way they lived... the implications of killing at a distance are huge, no other animals can kill as efficiently as a human can.

Yeah...but you said that human technological development was a result of our ability to project coercive threat. we didnt HAVE to invent to project any specific threat, we survived for thousands of years without spears/atlats. we used our minds and developed a technology that made things more efficient, made hunting more efficient. it wasnt the result of us deflecting anything, it was the result of our innovation.

with the stuff like atomic bombs i would agree because those are instances where people are racing to get to the finish line against each other. but my main point is that human development is not specifically tied to our ability to deflect threats thrown our way. it entails that, yes, definitly, as necessity is the mother of all invention, they say.

edit: think about humanity hundreds and thousands of years ago. it was an extremely hostile place with constant human on human violence. what do you think has changed from then and now? why is there so much less violence and so much more innovation? are modern people all of a sudden not prone to violence? why do you think in a matter of a few hundred years all of a sudden humans just became super peaceful, super industrious and innovative people? please attempt to provide a decent alternate theory.


why is it so hard to believe exactly?

i think you think that im disagreeing with the entire theory here. i agree with most of it. the stuff i dont agree with, from the information you've posted here, i posted above.

As to why humans have gotten less violent- i think its a matter of natural evolution. as people invent new technologies, everything becomes more efficient. thats the main function of technology. when things become more efficient, connections grow and develop. no longer does it take a day to reach the next county, we've developed cars to further minimize the troubles of traveling. you can fly around the world in a jet.

what happens when connections foster, on a person-to-person level is the interactions become more efficient, business prospers, trade prospers, cultures are able to share information and share perspectives and beliefs. in olden times people believed in god because thats all that was available. they couldnt go on the internet and read about buddhism or hinduism. they had their local church. or perhaps some visiting missionaries if they wanted to disavow their local religion and learn a new belief system. nowadays you have exposure to a literal world of belief systems to choose from, and different belief systems are allowed to overlap one another and exist in a more peaceful manner than in olden days when people would be killed for being of a different religion.

Another huge thing is, nowadays its simply more profitable to be peaceful. the crooks have learned that you can make more money working together than fighting against each other, and you can see this on a global level with stuff like the oil trade and how the united states literally goes in and takes out leaders in some countries to install dictators and shit.

Everything is more efficient, including crime. violence is limited to extreme situations in modern countries when before it was more accepted and common place. there's still alot of corruption and violence, its just evolved along with every other human system that has been in place for thousands of years. but as the world continues to shrink and as our inter-connection continues to grow, all of that shit is going to be filtered out, and IS being filtered out right now. You dont see witches being burned at the stake, but you see hicks dragging african americans through back country roads. its getting a little better.

anyway not to go off on a tangent but thats my perspective on the situation.

[matthewmunari]

:[quote=tedkennedy;515 73660]well yea humans didnt invent the bow or the atlat specifically for killing humans.
they just wanted a new hunting tool that just so happened to revolutionize the way they lived... the implications of killing at a distance are huge, no other animals can kill as efficiently as a human can.

edit: think about humanity hundreds and thousands of years ago. it was an extremely hostile place with constant human on human violence. what do you think has changed from then and now? why is there so much less violence and so much more innovation? are modern people all of a sudden not prone to violence? why do you think in a matter of a few hundred years all of a sudden humans just became super peaceful, super industrious and innovative people? attempt to provide a decent alternate theory.


Its debatable that there were even humans hundred of thousands of years ago, large flying insects, yes, but humans?I doubt it Lucy wasn't even related to us....It was 1/2of the missing link that gave life to every one of us alive today....when we do find the missing link, it should shed some light on us as a species..
Lucy (Australopithecus) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image:Lucyreconstruc tion.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by OldMan&TheWeed

I think a possible answer to this may lie in the bottleneck hypothesis.

Population bottleneck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

you'd have to have a VERY small population for that theory to come into play....theyre werent any human beings (proper) with no animal like characteristics 5 million years ago....now bring it back to 40 million, yes...but 5 million years ago (roughly the 1st proper humans began to reproduce)...(dumbfu cks like me whos a masochist) began painting their faces with dyed animal lard...Whatever killed the dinosaurs coukd kill us, ever think about that? What if the brontosaurus was a kind loving plant eater who had vocal chords to talk? not english, but some dino language, im off base now time to

[JcP]

Originally Posted by matthewmunari

Its debatable that there were even humans hundred of thousands of years ago, large flying insects, yes, but humans?I doubt it Lucy wasn't even related to us....It was 1/2of the missing link that gave life to every one of us alive today....when we do find the missing link, it should shed some light on us as a species.

06-11-03: 160,000-year-old skulls are oldest anatomically modern humans

unless you are arguing that fossils are not real and/or not really from the time they are from (IE: God put them there), you are wrong.

Homo Sapien fossils up to 160,000 years old have been found.

Lucy is a Australopithecus afarensis from 3.2 million years ago (3,200,000), which is a genetic precursor to the homo sapien mammal commonly called modern humans.


so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. You are either suggesting that the fossil record for HOMO SAPIENS is a trick by God, or you are confused.

If you agree that science and fossil records are real, then disagreeing with homo sapiens being at least 160,000 years old is looney. There are fossils that prove it....not fossils of evolutionary steps leading to homo sapien, but homo sapien fossils.

[tedkennedy]

[quote=matthewmunari; 51573852]:

Originally Posted by tedkennedy

well yea humans didnt invent the bow or the atlat specifically for killing humans.
they just wanted a new hunting tool that just so happened to revolutionize the way they lived... the implications of killing at a distance are huge, no other animals can kill as efficiently as a human can.

edit: think about humanity hundreds and thousands of years ago. it was an extremely hostile place with constant human on human violence. what do you think has changed from then and now? why is there so much less violence and so much more innovation? are modern people all of a sudden not prone to violence? why do you think in a matter of a few hundred years all of a sudden humans just became super peaceful, super industrious and innovative people? attempt to provide a decent alternate theory.


Its debatable that there were even humans hundred of thousands of years ago, large flying insects, yes, but humans?I doubt it Lucy wasn't even related to us....It was 1/2of the missing link that gave life to every one of us alive today....when we do find the missing link, it should shed some light on us as a species..
Lucy (Australopithecus) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image:Lucyreconstruc tion.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucy was an autralopithecus, an ancestor of ours before we diverged into the homo lineage.

lucy was a bi-pedal like us, however from studying her bone structure it is clear that she was not an elite thrower.

[tedkennedy]

Originally Posted by Waves

Yeah...but you said that human technological development was a result of our ability to project coercive threat. we didnt HAVE to invent to project any specific threat, we survived for thousands of years without spears/atlats. we used our minds and developed a technology that made things more efficient, made hunting more efficient. it wasnt the result of us deflecting anything, it was the result of our innovation.

then how can you explain the fact that there is an adaptive stasis between the time the atlatl was invented and the time the bow was invented? for a hundred thousand years very few new inventions came into the fossil record. a common misconception about human history is that it is a steady slope upwards. but infact it is a series of explosive "adaptive revolutions" followed by a stasis. this is a fact proved by the archaological record.

im trying to make the point that collectively the intelligence of a human being is limited by how much extra-genetic information he has available to him. if you live in the animal world, non-kin conflicts of interests severely limit the exchange of extra-genetic information and this is the sole reason why animals are not as smart as humans are, in some cases they actually have larger brains than us and some birds have vastly better vocal chords. why dont they act like humans then? the only reason they dont speak is because exchanging information would be dangerous for them.

i will try to use an example that is outside of the realm of biology. think about "the system" and "criminals". if there wasnt some way to stop criminals from exploiting the system, how could you ever have an orderly society? nature is dominated by "criminals". animals have not developted to the point of humans simply because they do not have a way to threaten "criminals" from exploiting the system. thus they treat all non-kin as potential threat and thus they do not speak to each other.

the reason that humans have all of a sudden progressed so far in the blink of the eye on the timeframe of history is that every time we stumble upon a new weapon that supresses conflicts of interest with increasing efficiency we increase the pool of individuals whom can work together. also, once you have a human village you can have people whom specialize in certain trades and then share their services with other people. the better you are at supressing non-kin conflicts of interest the more people you have working together, the more ideas you are pooling, the more inventions and ideas you are trading.

when i say non-kin, progressively the definition of kin evolves with every new weapon. origanolly kin would be considered your actual blood relatives. but with the evolution of weapons you have the evolution of villages, so now your kin is your village. then with nation-states you have an entire nation of "kin". i dont know if that clarifies anything.

bdat.

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by JcP

06-11-03: 160,000-year-old skulls are oldest anatomically modern humans

unless you are arguing that fossils are not real and/or not really from the time they are from (IE: God put them there), you are wrong.

Homo Sapien fossils up to 160,000 years old have been found.

Lucy is a Australopithecus afarensis from 3.2 million years ago (3,200,000), which is a genetic precursor to the homo sapien mammal commonly called modern humans.


so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. You are either suggesting that the fossil record for HOMO SAPIENS is a trick by God, or you are confused.

If you agree that science and fossil records are real, then disagreeing with homo sapiens being at least 160,000 years old is looney. There are fossils that prove it....not fossils of evolutionary steps leading to homo sapien, but homo sapien fossils.

i don't believe that slowly but surely, over time, we are what we are what we are today..(as in our human body structure)... you cannot tell me that an ape is a genetic precursor to a human, because that's just not true... we might be similar in the # of chromosones, but humans and animals (lucy falls into that category) are two different species..Why didnt the humans that you say lived 160,000 years ago create a writing system, or make rudimentary documentation of their lineage? .. they werehumans living like animals...plain and simple

[tedkennedy]

Originally Posted by matthewmunari

Why didnt the humans that you say lived 160,000 years ago create a writing system, or make rudimentary documentation of their lineage? .. they werehumans living like animals...plain and simple

because they werent behaviorally modern 160,000 years ago, they were physiologically the same they just didnt have the atlatl until about 90k years ago, which i explained in depth already in this thread

90k years ago u had the atlatl, an efficient spear chucking weapon, shortly after you started finding cave paintings and more advanced tools such as hewn hand axes