People Lived in This Cave for 78,000 Years
April 19, 2023 12:14 AM Subscribe
People Lived in This Cave for 78,000 Years. Excavations in Panga ya Saidi suggest technological and cultural change came slowly over time and show early humans weren't reliant on coastal resources.
Things were going really well for a while there. Then some gobshite invented the wheel and ruined everything.
posted by night_train at 1:44 AM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by night_train at 1:44 AM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
Holy shit.
We found it.
Let the rest go to hell.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:53 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
We found it.
Let the rest go to hell.
posted by BiggerJ at 1:53 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
1,076 square feet? I could hang out there for a couple millennia, easily.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:32 AM on April 19, 2023
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:32 AM on April 19, 2023
1,076 square feet? I could hang out there for a couple millennia, easily.
Open-concept floorplan, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:41 AM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
Open-concept floorplan, too.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:41 AM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
Only $5,000/mo. First, last and security deposit required.
posted by briank at 5:11 AM on April 19, 2023
posted by briank at 5:11 AM on April 19, 2023
*paging Plato*
posted by Fizz at 6:14 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 6:14 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
what did I do to be born in late-stage capitalism
posted by os tuberoes at 6:51 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by os tuberoes at 6:51 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
Interesting bit about jewellery. Fascinating to think that the need to create art is so deep rooted.
posted by night_train at 6:59 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by night_train at 6:59 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
Things were going really well for a while there. Then some gobshite invented the wheel and ruined everything.
Honestly, we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. In fact, it’s arguable that even the trees were a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:11 AM on April 19, 2023 [10 favorites]
Honestly, we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. In fact, it’s arguable that even the trees were a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:11 AM on April 19, 2023 [10 favorites]
Really puts that whole “500 days in a cave” person to shame.
Also damn people lived a lot longer back then.
posted by curious nu at 7:35 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
Also damn people lived a lot longer back then.
posted by curious nu at 7:35 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]
> Also damn people lived a lot longer back then.
Huh? I've never heard this. My understanding is that pre-modern human lifespans were probably roughly similar to our own, at least for males who made it through childhood. I've run across a few papers, mostly studying indigenous Mesoamerican remains, suggesting that female lifespans were probably shorter on average due to maternal mortality risks (each time you get pregnant, then and now, you are rolling the dice with Mr Death, due to the rather hazardous way humans give birth). But that might vary based on the availability of food affecting fertility so it might not be generally true everywhere.
People's lifespans seem to have gone into the shitter with the rise of agriculture and large-scale warfare, and only recently recovered (although as frequently pointed out, much of the gains in 'average' lifespan are due to improvements in infant and maternal mortality rather than dramatic changes that prolong old age).
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:13 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
Huh? I've never heard this. My understanding is that pre-modern human lifespans were probably roughly similar to our own, at least for males who made it through childhood. I've run across a few papers, mostly studying indigenous Mesoamerican remains, suggesting that female lifespans were probably shorter on average due to maternal mortality risks (each time you get pregnant, then and now, you are rolling the dice with Mr Death, due to the rather hazardous way humans give birth). But that might vary based on the availability of food affecting fertility so it might not be generally true everywhere.
People's lifespans seem to have gone into the shitter with the rise of agriculture and large-scale warfare, and only recently recovered (although as frequently pointed out, much of the gains in 'average' lifespan are due to improvements in infant and maternal mortality rather than dramatic changes that prolong old age).
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:13 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
> Also damn people lived a lot longer back then.
Huh? I've never heard this.
Pish! It says right in front-page post that people lived for 78,000 years in that cave!
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:16 AM on April 19, 2023 [33 favorites]
Another important find at the cave is what wasn’t there—lots of seafood. “Despite being relatively close to the coast, we do not have evidence that the hunter-gatherer populations occupying the cave were in any way dependent on coastal resources,” co-author Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History tells Schuster. “Instead, they were reliant on inland, terrestrial resources in their tropical forest and grassland ecosystem.”
Even then they knew what Bruce taught us in Finding Nemo... Fish are friends, not food.
posted by Snowflake at 8:39 AM on April 19, 2023
Even then they knew what Bruce taught us in Finding Nemo... Fish are friends, not food.
posted by Snowflake at 8:39 AM on April 19, 2023
Pish! It says right in front-page post that people lived for 78,000 years in that cave!
I'm calling the FAA; the noise of jokes flying over my head is becoming really distracting.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:48 AM on April 19, 2023 [20 favorites]
I'm calling the FAA; the noise of jokes flying over my head is becoming really distracting.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:48 AM on April 19, 2023 [20 favorites]
Things were going really well for a while there.
The 15-20 hour work week sounded pretty good too.
posted by fairmettle at 8:48 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
The 15-20 hour work week sounded pretty good too.
posted by fairmettle at 8:48 AM on April 19, 2023 [1 favorite]
The beginning part of Ryan North's How to Invent Everything notes how there have been some really long periods in our past (thousands to tens of thousands of years) where people could have invented something but didn't and the people just went on as they always had when they could have invented writing or agriculture. Kind of hard to believe now with the rapid pace of change that we experience but there were long periods where as far back as you could possibly go everything was exactly the same.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:01 PM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:01 PM on April 19, 2023 [4 favorites]
but there were long periods where as far back as you could possibly go everything was exactly the same
Ripe for disruption *is immediately slain by ancestors who know what they're doing*
(How to Invent Everything is great fun, highly recommended)
posted by curious nu at 5:11 PM on April 19, 2023
Ripe for disruption *is immediately slain by ancestors who know what they're doing*
(How to Invent Everything is great fun, highly recommended)
posted by curious nu at 5:11 PM on April 19, 2023
I remember that being commented on in a New Yorker article about one of the great cave painting discoveries. That initially it was assumed that it was the same age as other French caves with paintings, because the style was the same, but in fact it was IIRC 10,000 years older. So for ten thousand years the art style and painting materials and technique had remained the same, and while we couldn't be sure, it suggested that the religious or cultural system remained much the same, because they kept on going down into dark caves to paint the same sort of images. And it was really hard to imagine human systems being stable over that extent of time.
posted by tavella at 9:11 PM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by tavella at 9:11 PM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]
Kind of hard to believe now with the rapid pace of change that we experience but there were long periods where as far back as you could possibly go everything was exactly the same.
I find it interesting to consider that all those generations were of modern homo sapiens - not some kind of early hominids whose behaviour and motivations we could only guess at. They were us: falling in love, bitching about the neighbours, taking part in religious ceremonies, bringing up kids, following fashions, throwing parties, coming up with new recipes, getting ill, talking about the good old days and dying. There is nothing to tell us that their lives would have been any more or less fulfilling and pleasant than our own - the only difference was that there appeared to have been almost no technological change in all those generations - which we can contrast with the frenetic change we see at present. Those generations of inhabitants are a reminder that it is possible to be completely human while being no more concerned about technological evolution than any other animal would be. I feel there is an important lesson for our restless souls there.
posted by rongorongo at 4:56 AM on April 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
I find it interesting to consider that all those generations were of modern homo sapiens - not some kind of early hominids whose behaviour and motivations we could only guess at. They were us: falling in love, bitching about the neighbours, taking part in religious ceremonies, bringing up kids, following fashions, throwing parties, coming up with new recipes, getting ill, talking about the good old days and dying. There is nothing to tell us that their lives would have been any more or less fulfilling and pleasant than our own - the only difference was that there appeared to have been almost no technological change in all those generations - which we can contrast with the frenetic change we see at present. Those generations of inhabitants are a reminder that it is possible to be completely human while being no more concerned about technological evolution than any other animal would be. I feel there is an important lesson for our restless souls there.
posted by rongorongo at 4:56 AM on April 20, 2023 [8 favorites]
I feel the opposite - I think that there is some factor about this area that lead to a kind of stasis - whether you consider that good or bad is up to you, but to extrapolate this group across all of homo sapiens seems wrong. Maybe they were warring constantly, maybe this place was off the beaten path so they were basically isolated, or maybe this particular group had it really good (or really bad) so they didn't have the time or the desire to innovate. Maybe they were really dumb, basically the Idiocracy group of homo sapiens.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:30 AM on April 20, 2023
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:30 AM on April 20, 2023
It's interesting that they made shell beads but didn't make use of the food resources of the shore. I wonder if the shoreline was traditionally the province of other groups, and Panga ya Saidi residents traded for the shells.
posted by tavella at 3:46 PM on April 20, 2023
posted by tavella at 3:46 PM on April 20, 2023
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(A bit more footage of excavations in that cave)
posted by rongorongo at 1:33 AM on April 19, 2023 [6 favorites]