Imagine living in a pod in a city crammed togther with a bunch of annoying stinky mfs and you are constantly bloated because you are eating a shitty diet that is mostly grain with no space to escape. I would also bonk some noggins.
The researchers put the increase in violence in the 5th and 4th millennia BCE down to the agglomeration of humans in the first, still poorly organized, cities. The rate of violence only reduced significantly once legal systems, a centrally controlled army, and religious institutions (for example, religious festivals) developed.
this seems to be the origins of the Tower of Babel story to me.. in the Late Bronze Age people still told stories about a time long before (3000 years prior), when people had tried to settle down in those poorly organized, agglomeration cities mentioned in the article.. they still told stories about the chaos of cities without laws/religion and no common language..
Reminds me of how things like flood myths might have actually come from times of great natural disasters that got passed down in stories.
I’ve also always wondered if stories about elves, dwarves, etc. are ancient, tattered memories of prehistoric times when homo sapiens was not the only hominid walking the earth.
We overlapped with Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, etc. (And interbred. nationalgeographic.com/…/enigmatic-human-relative… ) So there was a time when anatomically modern humans walked the earth when other almost-human-but-not species still lived.
And it’s always seemed to me the variety of almost-humans in mythology from around the world might be in some cases an ancient memory of that.
in general i think we undervalue the ability of pre-literate humans to keep memories alive for truly inconceivable stretches of time.. especially when they are really important, like when entire cities tear themselves apart with anarchy and no doubt every known disease as a result.. the drama of it can't be overstated on the minds of the people who lived it.. they had only recently been kicked out of Eden, which was also very real in their minds.. those people knew all the Gods had turned their backs on them, because they lived the first real large scale human suffering..
This together with all the thousands of years old cheeses, 2000 year old bog butter, and edible mammoth meat we found, we could make the sickest charcuterie board in history
New World capuchin monkeys are well-known by their ability to solve problems using stone tools that have the characteristics and morphology of some human-made stone tools.
I knew chimps etc used sticks but was unaware of actual stone tool use by monkeys
Not “AI”. It’s a standard machine learning model Seems to be some image segmentation plus extras using PyTorch. The original source never mentioned the term “AI”, so why did the Guardian decide to bandwagon jump? The research and discovery is just as exciting without smacking the AI label on it.
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