Why, given all that we know about how men are moved by incentives, do you think that nothing much (in terms of agriculture, modes of production) seemed to change until 50,000BC though humans had been around for 200,000 years? There must be considerably more to history?
Necessary and Sufficient Causes of the Industrial Revolution: Some Critical Remarks on Mises and His Explanation - Hoppe
Makes one wonder how accurate those numbers are
It only seems slow because you’re used to faster change. It’s not so easy changing your entire mode of production. It was the biggest revolution in the history of the planet for animals. It takes a while before everything is in place for it; even if you’re biologically capable of being very smart.
The main problem was… How do I say this… Getting rid of the insanity.
It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are and if you’re looking to further your own goals, when life is as incredibly simple as it was for primitive man, and in an environment with no particular creative background, or many particular precedents for large changes, only small inventions, then it is pretty hard to change just about anything. This is also why it took man so long to really begin advancing at a fast rate. For most of the race life was… Fuzzy, simplistic, mystical, close to insanity, run entirly by spirits they couldn’t see, and totally without any particular amount of inventive thought.
Still, as against the other posters, I would argue that it doesn’t take 10,000 years to figure out trade, or 100,000 years to build a toilet seat. There are some obvious ways a caveman say, could improve his life and there were obvious sources of discomfort (parasites, bugs eating your poo, sewage, pooling and specializing labor to mass produce grains, making gunpowder to kill the big game that was so prevalent at the time…). That it took men so long to think of these simple things I think testifies to how utterly incomplete our history is, and how far off the mark it is.
But along with hoppe, and agreeing with other posters, I wouldn’t discount the idea that man was simply impeded by subsidies from nature, or harsh physical conditions, or even that they were not naturally selected for long chains of cause-effect thought. But even then there are ways to make oneself better off that still exist in case 1, and indeed a subsidy from nature would provide the incentive for doing this. In case 2, it has been shown that ancient men were capable of sailing the atlantic ocean and may’ve settled the americas so I don’t think physical harshness was such a huge set-back (although the earth was devasted by a meteor strike which nearly wiped out man -could this be the answer?) and in case 3, it is possible that people were interbreeding and hybridizing with other human species which tended to make causal thought unnecessary but sitll, that means one would have to accept that the other unmixed humans were just doing nothing?
I dunno, it still seems more far-fetched than saying humans built societies like ours for thousands of years, etc.
Ancient man were far better navigators than we are today. There are some things that just can’t advance until there is a major discovery. Like electricity. Plus when a way of life works, there is little incentive to change.
Wat
First: indeed ancient history is in a dire need of being rewritten. There are tons of evidence form non-orthodox scientists that around 10’500 BC there was a peak of human civilization, with such wonders and the pyramids having been purportedly created back than (stellar time maps: the pyramids reflect the position of Orion’s Belt as it appeared in 10’500 BC).
Second: I would say that when you start form almost no capital at all, saving and growth is very difficult, costly and slow. If modern would be left to save though its own forces alone, it would take a century to begin lifting itself out of poverty. For example medieval and where considered fast-growers as their per-capita income tripled in four centuries; a ‘record-breaking’ 0.28% increase per annum! That was considered fast in the middle ages. So humble beginnings preclude fast solutions.
Third: migrations. Agriculture was discovered in naturally fertile regions of the Fertile Crescent, and . Yet the Sapiens originated in . The time needed for a slowly increasing sapiens population to push to the would by itself account for much of the ‘lost time’.
Finally, if 150’000 years to discover agriculture still look a ridiculous amount of time, I myself fall back to my favorite explanation: ancient humans did not seek a better life, they where happy to reach procreation age. It took all that time for evolution to yield a decent amount of humans who actually did want to improve their livelihood. The Summerian cities where thus born.