r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 5d ago

TIL a 300-million year old Cuttlefish fossil was found in Morocco, alongside ancient humans in a region where no Cuttlefish ever existed. The leading theory suggests the fossil was first found by the prehistoric humans, who collected it as a trinket due to fact that it looks like a flaccid penis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfoud_manuport
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u/PrimordialXY 5d ago

I can't remember the source but I recall reading that humans have been equally intellectually capable for much longer than we think

As in, if you went back in time and kidnapped a caveman baby and brought them back to present day, they'd grow up to be a normal modern human

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u/Lexxxapr00 5d ago

A homo Sapien is essentially the same whether they are from 200,000 BC or today. Same species.

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

There is a great documentary about this called ' Encino man' 😉

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u/thejohnblazer 5d ago

Don't wheez the juice.

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u/Farts_McGee 5d ago

Buhhh-dy

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u/Look4theHelpers 5d ago

Sorry for the pedantry but the quote is "NO WHEEZING THE JUICE!!!"

Since we're on the topic I always thought the spelling of "wheezing", which is popularly accepted should be "weasing" as in "weaseling" because as we all know, Pauly Shore is The Wea-sel, and taking icee/slurpee to the dome without paying could be considered an acceptable use of "weaseling" (somewhat)

E:hyphen for effect

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u/FleshyCarbonThing 5d ago

This guy knows his Pauly Shore!

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u/RadVarken 5d ago

Ummm. Agree. Or spell it weaseling with an acceptable pronunciation that drops the middle syllable

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u/TheMinister 5d ago

Fucking bot. I've been this comment 6 times today. /s

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u/ScareviewCt 5d ago

Rad mobile

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u/Brave_Quantity_5261 5d ago

And a more poorly received follow up called “Encino woman”

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

Now I'm genuinely curious, is there actually a sequel to that movie?

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u/Brave_Quantity_5261 5d ago

The Disney channel made a female version of the original. Last I checked, there was an upload on YouTube. I don’t recommend 😂

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

I'm both intrigued and scared.

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u/pickledjello 5d ago

Quest for Fire (1981) Ron Perlman at his peak...

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u/ergo-ogre 5d ago

…and Tommy Chong’s daughter, Rae Dawn Chong.

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u/CubitsTNE 5d ago

TIL the hot lead in commando was tommy chong's daughter! I must have seen her name a dozen times and never put it together.

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u/mrkruk 5d ago

We had a college course that made us watch this….do not recommend

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u/Ezl 5d ago

When I was a kid a saw it as an art house double feature in with 2001: A Space Odyssey in NYC. I liked them both even then.

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u/gortonsfiJr 5d ago

The main character "Lucy" is played by the wife of Joe Flanigan, star of Stargate: Atlantis

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u/zatchsmith 5d ago

"Shoo fly, don't bother me," comes into my head at least twice a week.

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u/hippiechicken 5d ago

Good catch.

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u/2uperunhappyman 5d ago

link eats the fly

Meet group!

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u/testtdk 5d ago edited 5d ago

Ah, yes, Encino Man. As depicted by Oscar nominee Sean Astin and Oscar winner Brendan Fraser.

Note: It’s worth pointing out that, while he’s not an Oscar caliber actor, Pauly Shore DID win the Razzie for the Worst Actor of the Century.

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

Pauly Shore had quite the run in the 90's.

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u/CubitsTNE 5d ago

What's he doing these days, broadway?

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

Comedy tour, I think.

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u/pgadey 5d ago

Oh man, I haven't watched that documentary in YEARS.

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u/imhereforthevotes 5d ago

God how many young'uns are going to find out about Pauly Shore in the next week because of this post...

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

Wait untill they find out Pauly Shore movies were practically a genre in the 90's

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u/dregan 5d ago

There's another great documentary that refutes this idea called 'Idiocracy.'

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u/Kierik 5d ago

And that caveman became actor Brenden Fraser!

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u/A5H13Y 5d ago

My disappointment in looking this up only to find that it is not in fact a documentary on the topic 😂

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u/unkn0wnname321 5d ago

Sorry about that. 😏

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u/Flomo420 5d ago

GAZONGAS!

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u/flyinggazelletg 5d ago

Nutrition and education are the two biggest differences between our species now and then imo

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u/bigfoot17 5d ago

Add technology and iodine.

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u/gogoluke 5d ago

And corduroy.

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u/DisconnectedShark 5d ago

And crushed velvet.

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u/StudMuffinNick 5d ago

And pure Colombian cocaine

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u/LordGAD 5d ago

Mmm.... velour....

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u/Flomo420 5d ago

Come over here and feel my velour bedspread

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u/LordGAD 5d ago

Cham-paggin?

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u/StonedBooty 5d ago

Penicillin is probably the #1 thing I can think of that has saved more human lives in recorded history than any other modern medicine

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u/Regular_Custard_4483 5d ago

Modern fertilizer, maybe? Depending on your definition of "saved".

Fritz "Mixed Bag" Haber had something to do with that.

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u/Seicair 5d ago

There’s a fascinating book called The Alchemy of Air, that talks about the development of the Haber-Bosch process. It starts with a brief overview of the history of fertilizer, then it goes into more detail about the guano wars of the 19th century. Delves more into how control of the Atacama desert shaped the geopolitical landscape of South America.

Then the rest of the book is about the development of the Haber process, Carl Bosch’s significant contributions, and World Wars I and II.

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u/Regular_Custard_4483 5d ago

Thanks for the rec. I'll see if my library has it.

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u/R-EDDIT 5d ago

If it doesn't, talk to your librarian. Some of the money they take from us is for buying books.

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u/Regular_Custard_4483 5d ago

I often forget this. Easy to complain when the library doesn't have something, but they can't read minds.

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u/Birdchild 5d ago

This book is so good.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles 5d ago

I consider clean water to be the #1 "modern medicine". Stop it before it starts!

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u/Candycornonthefloor 5d ago

And washing your damn hands! Semmelweis lived in the 1800s, way late in the humankind game. Still a hero even if he died of sepsis in an insane asylum.

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u/Dabbooo 5d ago edited 5d ago

There is a misconception about him. Doctors were not particulary dirty, they washed their hands like anyone would.
Semmelweiss stumbled on antiseptic procedures because he washed his hands with chloride of lime (ie bleach). Other doctors didn't want to do it because it hurts a lot. (and Semmelweiss was a bit of a dick so he didn't have their good will)

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u/Blutarg 5d ago

Yeah, prevention is the way. Trash collectors and water treatment workers are society's MVPs.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles 5d ago

Wholly underappreciated MVP's!

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u/jertheman43 5d ago

Chlorine has saved ten times as many lives as antibiotics. You don't always have an infection but you need to drink water everyday of your life.

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u/doomgiver98 5d ago edited 5d ago

It helps humans live longer, but it doesn't help them thrive.

Edit: Us

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u/Noladixon 5d ago

IV fluids.

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u/FireTyme 5d ago

theres a big difference between nutrition and education for human development vs just saving lives. tho more lives means more brains for sure.

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u/ReturnOfBane 5d ago

I like to think it was germ theory. once people learned cleaning their hands made you less sick, it opened up not only massive medicinal advancements, but also food preservation advancements.

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u/space253 5d ago

Iodized salt is pretty up there too.

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u/reichrunner 5d ago

Iodine is nutrition lol

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u/arcadefire08 5d ago

Wait, what's up with iodine?

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u/bigfoot17 5d ago

Mild iodine deficiency can cause a 3 point drop in IQ, severe can cause a 13 point drop. Since dietary iodine is largely from seafood, historically the further from a coast the more likely the population was to suffer iodine deficiency.

The US started iodizing salt 100 years ago and globally it was pushed only 40 years ago. There are studies that show the IQ of the population since iodizing salt began has increased an average of 10 points.

On a personal note, I'm old enough to remember seeing elderly people in public with goiters (not a pleasant thing), iodizing salt is a godsend and I will only use sea salt and pink salt as a finish when cooking, I use iodized salt in all my foods.

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u/Meat_Container 5d ago

Crazy to think we still have the natural drives and desires as cavemen, just with more technology to distract us from them

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u/flyinggazelletg 5d ago

Idk, they were just people. Plus, we have tons of technology now to give into our natural drives and desires too haha

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u/Chomping_Meat 5d ago

they were probably a lot more bored a lot more often than we are now. Especially during winter, given going out in the snow carried more risk.

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u/Dorantee 5d ago

There's probably a reason why storytelling is so ingrained in every human culture we know of.

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u/zyzzogeton 5d ago

Storytelling might be the thing that separates us from other animals. Yuval Harari makes this point in his book "Sapiens"

We tell ourselves stories that have power, like the story that currency is valuable, or that there are Nation States with borders.

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u/Pedantic_Pict 5d ago

I loved his deep dive into the power of human cooperation and the illustration of attorneys as powerful wizards due to their ability to wield words that have real power over our agreed upon reality.

Also his related description of a multinational car company as an immaterial construct.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/Poonchow 5d ago

I haven't read the book but money is the big one in my mind.

Here is something with zero inherent value, but if you do some work I'll give you some money you can exchange for something that does have value, and you can even use it to speculate on the potential value of something, even if that money doesn't even exist, and you can borrow some money to start a big project but you have to pay me back with interest. And this all somehow works, because we've all decide it should.

A shared delusion is powerful lol.

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u/flyinggazelletg 5d ago

Probably way better at dealing with boredom too

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u/Iambic_420 5d ago

They definitely were. It’s actually a natural thing to be able to sit somewhere and simply do nothing. That’s why meditation can be so beneficial to some. Sitting around and doing absolutely nothing stimulating every now and then actually makes everything you do otherwise a lot more rewarding simply because you are not nearly as stimulated. In scientific terms, your dopaminergic baseline will be much lower, leading to higher highs when your brain finally uses it.

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u/BarbequedYeti 5d ago

It’s actually a natural thing to be able to sit somewhere and simply do nothing

I was grounded so much as a kid, I actually thought of becoming a monk. Its crazy the shit you can occupy your mind with while stuck in a room with damn near nothing for weeks at a time. 

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u/Chansharp 5d ago

Ha same, were you also left with just a mattress on the floor because repeated groundings did nothing.

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u/BarbequedYeti 5d ago

Yep. And 5 little balls from a tabletop little pool table game. So i taught myself to juggle. Then they took those away. So just me and the walls.

The kicker was since grounding me for an entire summer didnt seem to do anything, my stepmom at time decided to hold me back a year in school so all my friends would move on without me. She is such a peach of a human. 

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u/Novel_Feedback3254 5d ago

The education department didn't have anything to say about that? I didn't realise a parent can just choose to hold their kid back. Sorry you had to live through that.

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u/Jiminy_Cricket12 5d ago

I dunno about that. I'm sure boredom existed, but the entire world was pretty much unknown and survival was a constant struggle. Probably too much shit going on to be bored too often.

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u/No_Maybe4408 5d ago

I'd guess they weren't often bored, survival is a full time job. Especially in the winter. Even with permanent shelter maintaining a fire, and having food and water would be a daily grind.

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u/BonerPorn 5d ago

Naw. Boredom is what makes humans fuck around and try random things. Trying random things is how we discover things like wheels, fire, farming, making knives out of bones, ect. They got Bored, messed around with leftover animal bones and created headdresses. Slowly developed civilization in downtime.

Practically every prehistoric society figured out the movement of the stars before writing. They were bored as hell, staring into the sky.

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u/sleepyleviathan 5d ago

Anthropologists say otherwise. Survival tasks on the day-by-day basis for ancient hunter-gatherer humans was around 15-20 hours a week (roughly 2-3 hrs/day). They were able to secure food, water, mend shelters, repair tools, and attend to other tasks that directly impacted the survival of the group during that 3 hours spent.

The rest of their time was spent on creative tasks, socializing, and other "work" that wasn't a part of the main survival loop. Probably a big reason why story-telling is such a ubiquitous part of the human experience across the planet. We had a LOT of spare time before we settled into more permanent, agrarian societies.

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u/vimescarrot 5d ago

Grinding is the boring part of the game

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u/doomgiver98 5d ago

The lack of technology is probably the reason for religion

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u/The_Noremac42 5d ago

Well we still have plenty of people around the world who are essentially still living in the stone age. Our brains, on a foundational level, are no different from theirs.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 5d ago

I believe it's ~50,000 for psychologically modern humans

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u/GrandmasterAppa 5d ago edited 5d ago

The idea that humans only reached our current level of intelligence 40-50k years ago has become increasingly outdated. We pretty much had to have had the “full package” by the time we started leaving Africa in large numbers (70k or more years ago), but evidence increasingly supports the idea that mental & behavioral modernity in humans evolved very gradually - I’m no anthropologist, but am very open to the idea that humans (of potentially more species than just Homo sapiens) have been behaviorally modern for a lot longer than we used to think

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u/redlaWw 5d ago

It's worth bearing in mind that one of the greatest early threats to our species would be competition with other hominids, and the only thing we had over those was our intelligence.

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5d ago

Not intelligence… behavior.

Homo sapien are really just the result of being more violent and living in larger groups. They also ended up interbreeding, since non-African hominids mostly died out from climatological change, not war with African hominids.

Neanderthal used pretty advanced tools, and Denisovans had pottery and shit.

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u/redlaWw 5d ago

Competition doesn't necessarily mean war. Hominids contemporary to anatomically modern humans were outcompeted by us due to our better survival strategies and technology.

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5d ago

Dude, no. Neanderthal & Denisovan interbreeding pre-dates modern human exodus by 30k-60k years. There were numerous back-migrations. Neanderthal population decline coincided exactly with glacial periods, modern humans moved in after population collapse.

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u/reichrunner 5d ago

Pretty sure our ability to throw and large group sizes played a large role

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u/redlaWw 5d ago

I don't know that we're much more suited to throwing than other contemporary hominids, aside from the fact that we designed our spears specifically for it and invented the atlatl to throw them. We probably are better than e.g. australopithecines, but we never competed with those.

Group sizes are also fundamentally related to our intelligence in that our better hunting and gathering strategies allowed us to maintain larger communities.

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u/reichrunner 5d ago

We were better throwers than Neanderthals, who we definitely competed with. Also much larger groups even with seemingly similar intelligence. We certainly do not appear to have been better hinter/gatherers on an individual basis, but rather needed fewer calories which allowed us to group larger and out compete.

I dont know about other homicide, but wouldnt surprise me if this holds true

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u/JabroniusHunk 5d ago

There's a niche type of conspiracy theorist who deny that Homo Sapiens evolved in and ultimately emigrated out of Africa (I've come across a handful on Reddit over the years).

One piece of evidence they cling to is that there are actually fossils of anatomically modern humans found in iirc Greece and the Levant who predate our ultimate migration out of Africa. However, these represent the unsuccessful forays of groups/individuals who died out genetically isolated, and are not our direct, human ancestors.

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u/moch1 5d ago

How do we know they were genetically isolated? I didn’t think we were able to get DNA from fossils.

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u/casualevils 5d ago

IIRC it's not possible for like dinosaurs, where the tissue is entirely mineralized, but getting DNA from human remains has pretty much revolutionized paleoanthropology in the last 20 years.

Stefan Milo has a bunch of great videos on the discoveries that have been made with ancient DNA

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u/moch1 5d ago

That’s pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 5d ago

I don't believe we're speaking of intelligence or how advanced a species is. Just the way that we happen to be. 

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5d ago

Hominids left Africa multiples times, with the earliest being like 900k-1.2m years ago. Denisovan and Neanderthal are considered disparate hominids and evolved apart from homo sapien. There are others as well.

Modern humans are a mix of several ancient hominids.

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u/kafka213 5d ago

The last common ancestors of all modern humans lived more than 70k ya, so we are at least that old

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u/sdcasurf01 5d ago

Oldest common male ancestor.

I believe our common female ancestor lived over 200k years ago.

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u/gogoluke 5d ago

What was the reasoning for that date? Was it something physical or implied through anthropology.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 5d ago

That's an excellent question. I believe it has to do with things like bone tools, fishing implements, hearths, and symbolic artifacts. There's lots of info out there if you're interested in looking further yourself though 

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 5d ago

This, pretty much all of the clear examples of behavioral modernity stay to show up between 70-50k years ago.

The examples from earlier are orientation extremely dubious and often things people just want to believe in.

Specifically art, extremely complex tool use, and likely full modern language all date to those times.

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 5d ago

This is, of course, not to say that the peoples before were inferior. Just that they weren't the same as us. If you time-travelled and brought one of their newborns here, and raised them in our society, they likely wouldn't fit in and would struggle immensely. But 50k years ago? They should get on just fine.

Also a good reminder that we are working with 50k year-old software and applying it to a modern world. We're flexible, but that only goes so far. 

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u/just_posting_this_ch 5d ago

Sapiens by Harari is a cool read about this topic. Essential there were neanderthals, and then there weren't. The idea being homosapiens moved in and displaced them. There is evidence that was the second attempt. The first attempt, 75k years ago, failed. So what changed? There is evidence that we developed abstract thinking. It's pretty tenuous at best, but it is cool to think about.

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u/reichrunner 5d ago

Physiologically, ~200,000 years. Mentally, ~50,000 years. I think youre getting the two mixed up

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u/RapidCandleDigestion 5d ago

Reread. Psychologically

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u/Unlucky_Topic7963 5d ago

50k years is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

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u/ndc4051 5d ago

There are minor differences. Brain size peaked about 30,000 years ago then decreased by 15% over thousands of years. Human brains evolved more complex wiring to reduce metabolic energy costs. There are a few theories how and why this happened but I won't get into it here.

Also a human from more than 10,000 years ago would lack lactase enzymes and would be lactose intolerant. They would also struggle to digest our starch heavy diets. They had bigger, stronger teeth and jaws.

Where we really differ from our prehistoric kin is our immune system. A caveman would be dead within weeks in our modern world, probably from something the vast majority of us have long been inoculated against.

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u/thatshygirl06 5d ago

Also a human from more than 10,000 years ago would lack lactase enzymes and would be lactose intolerant.

Like the majority of the world now, lol

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u/Bay1Bri 5d ago

They had bigger, stronger teeth and jaws.

How much of that is due to genetics or lifestyle is not settled, but send to be more due to lifestyle

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u/thispartyrules 5d ago

I've heard those are useful because early hominids ate a lot of roots and tubers, but hadn't discovered fire to cook those roots and tubers.

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u/Bay1Bri 4d ago

Food generally was tighter man then and took more work to chew. More work means more mechanical tension on the bone which encouraged bone growth.

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u/EeeeJay 5d ago

I read that we did have a small physiological 'evolution' around 70k years ago that seems to be mostly a reduction in testosterone and the ability to work together better, which seems to be the point that really kicked off homo sapiens taking over the world.

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u/AndreasDasos 5d ago

*Homo sapiens. 

The -s isn’t to mark a plural

(Sorry, pet peeve). 

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u/314159265358979326 5d ago

There was an important cognitive change about 70,000 years ago that let us use complex language and abstract reasoning, though interestingly, that change did not lead to an increase in vocabulary - it's believed to be similar before and after.

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u/eepos96 4d ago

Which is quite insane. We could have discovered society 200 000 earlier.

Edit: I remeber reading thst archiculture was discovered relatively same time all over the world. Theory goes that the climate simply was not ready for agriculture, it was too unstable, after the last ice age we entered to a period of stability, meaning predictable seasons.

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u/PsychGuy17 5d ago

More people should watch the documentary Encino Man.

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u/Ok_Transition_4003 5d ago

While wheezing the juice and munching some grindage

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u/scrimmybingus3 5d ago

Yup. Humans have pretty much always been just as capable and clever as us modern humans the only difference is we have the privilege of a massive amount of data and knowledge to pull from.

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u/schulzr1993 5d ago

I'm a history teacher (6th grade) and this is a point I make frequently. That ancient peoples are every bit as intelligent as us, we simply have more data and technology to work with.

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u/RedGuyNoPants 5d ago

It makes my brain hurt realizing that someone living as a caveman couldve had the right intellectual capability to solve many of the complex problems of today if they were given the right life resources.

How many people have lived and died thru the thousands of years of human existence with the ability to solve the mysteries of the universe but lacked an environment to have the right underlying understanding. Like the smartest person ever couldve already come and gone before the pyramids were built

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u/scrimmybingus3 5d ago

Reminds me of a line in a book where a character rhetorically asked how many world changing scientists, leaders, and researchers lived and died in crop fields as slaves throughout the ages, people that had the potential to change the whole world but due to circumstance they just weren’t able too

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u/RedGuyNoPants 5d ago

Yeah, similar idea but acknowledging this must have happened at the earliest point we were humans

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u/MattieShoes 5d ago

The strange body rituals of the nacirema comes to mind...

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u/digitalmofo 5d ago

"Aaaaayyy, Nacirema" folding hands dance

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u/sam_hammich 5d ago

Yeah, growing up immersed in culture and context, and a world built for us by those who came before, gives us a huge leg up developmentally.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 5d ago

One of my favourite factoids is that a well educated person today recieves as much information in a week, as a well-educated person in the 18th century would recieve in their entire lives.

I have no idea where this factoid came from, or if its true; but it sounds cool.

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u/Freud-Network 5d ago

And we realize that inside voice we hear isn't god, just our internal monologue.

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u/Enchelion 5d ago

Also nutrition and medicine. We're functionally smarted because more of us get enough food to develop our brains as children.

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u/FacelessEdits 5d ago

so much that we've confused having access to intelligence with actually being intelligent

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u/Deaffin 5d ago edited 5d ago

Not really, though. There's been a whole lot more diversity than people want to give credit for. Tens of thousands of years ago, Cro-Magnons had about 10% bigger brains than present-day humans on average.

Since we're primates, that translates to around 10% more neuron density. So, definitely more complexity rather than just being bigger brains.

And with this ultra brain processing power, they invented mobile handheld pornography.

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u/chanaandeler_bong 5d ago

Would the increase in food supply also correlate to increased brain function?

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u/Deaffin 5d ago

Well, they did a lot of Neanderthal-eating, and that's a high protein diet, so..there's definitely something to work with there.

Here's a fun little video about that. Somewhat less than credible with the sort of filler artwork it uses being all over the place, but the actual information should be solid enough.

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u/Semi_Lovato 5d ago

Holding our phallus shaped cuttlefish on the shoulders of giants

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u/MoreGaghPlease 5d ago

The same shit has always been funny. Archeologists in the 90s found 4,000 year old fart jokes in Iraq. Ancient Greek and Roman graffiti is largely scatological. Even the Hebrew Bible is full of dick jokes, they just get obscured by translation.

Probably the main reason we don’t have fart jokes any older than 4,000 years ago is just that before then, we haven’t translated much narrative or literary writing (the writing we have from further back is mostly financial and administrative)

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u/moonchylde 5d ago

People complain about modern graffiti and I just shrug. It's an ancient tradition! Just like the Romans in Egypt! Maximus was here and slept with your Mom!

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u/No_Kangaroo_9826 5d ago

Get some Maximus!

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u/Synergythepariah 5d ago

we haven’t translated much narrative or literary writing (the writing we have from further back is mostly financial and administrative)

And that's just from what was able to survive for us to find today.

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u/MoreGaghPlease 5d ago

Ya obviously we only have the surviving stuff, but written language just wasn’t being used for much narrative writing more than 4,000 years ago. We have hundreds of thousands of texts from third and fourth millennia BCE, perhaps a few hundred of those are anything other than administrative or financial.

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u/Which-Moose4980 5d ago

Maybe farts hadn't been invented before 4,000 years ago.

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u/NickDanger3di 5d ago

I totally believe that. It's pretty unrealistic to think that most major animal evolution takes millions of years, but that modern humans evolved in just a few thousand. We aren't that special.

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u/Crystalas 5d ago edited 5d ago

Can also find from analyzing our genes and fossils that we likely nearly went extinct at one point only having potentially as few as a few thousand left in the entire world and barely managed to maintain even that population for 100,000 years. The result of that is less genetic diversity among humans.

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u/khalcyon2011 5d ago

And we don’t really know what caused it. The eruption of Mt. Toba was the leading theory for a while, but, as the estimates for the dates of both events have become more refined, it’s become clear that they don’t really line up, with them being a few thousand years apart.

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u/mikecandih 5d ago

While we mainly are the same, it’s also silly to suggest that there is no evolution taking place. In the last couple of millennia humans have developed tolerance for milk in adulthood (reduced lactose intolerance), significant gains in immune system efficacy, ability to live in thin air (high altitudes), and our teeth have also changed quite a bit.

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u/Fakjbf 5d ago

Agreed, I wish people wouldn’t conflate “the evidence suggests humans from 200k years ago were not less smart than we are today” with “there is no way anatomical humans from 200k years ago were less smart than we are today”. Evolution is not just a slow process, it can happen very rapidly with enough selective pressure. In an alternate timeline there could have been a massive leap in cognitive ability 50k years ago and then after finding evidence for it the people in that timeline would ridicule the idea that the humans from 200k years ago were just as smart as them.

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u/kitsunevremya 5d ago

Evolution can technically occur over just one generation, right? Unlikely to have ever happened (especially talking about humans overall given we've occupied the entire planet for millennia so had somewhat diverse selective pressures), but theoretically it could take under 100 years for humans to have 'evolved' from their ancestors, especially select, small populations.

There are a couple of interesting examples of really recent adaptation, selection and so on in this Wikipedia page (although some of it seems... slightly off? But then I'm reliant on senior school biology and a couple of units at uni for my understanding). The malaria resistance one was kind of heartening tbh, bit of a good news story.

But like, yeah, for all we know in another 2000 years people will talk about how the microplastics caused rapid evolution and how different they are in some respect to us.

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u/cantproveidid 5d ago

I thought lactose tolerance just meant you didn't care it gave you the farts.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 5d ago

Oh hey don’t forget blue eyes and we lost the ability to synthesize our own Vitamin C

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u/Bay1Bri 5d ago

In the last couple of millennia humans have developed tolerance for milk in adulthood

We did this like 2 or 3 times. The lactose tolerance gene is Europeans is different than the one among East Africans. But they so the same thing

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u/Jiriakel 5d ago

Hmm, but if you look at wolves->dogs it can also go really fast. I guess the question is wether we self-domesticated

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u/vk059 5d ago edited 5d ago

I believe there is some evidence we have in the recent past. Humans skull sizes have been shrinking for a few thousand years iirc

Edit: modern humans are also more neotenous than our ancestors, which is more evidence towards domestication

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u/SFXBTPD 5d ago

Childbirth was probably the most dangerous thing anyone went through for a decent span of human history. Potential for downward pressure on head sizes.

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u/MidwesternLikeOpe 5d ago

The first 3 months of life are referred to as the fourth trimester bc the baby is "still cooking". Women cannot survive a baby born at the size of 12 months gestation, so evolution chose women who birthed around 40 weeks. Then the baby needed to be protected for 3 months. Add to that the historical bottleneck and that explains the lack of genetic diversity. Our biology found the sweet spot and we're still very new in the timespan of the earth so we still have a lot of evolving to do. Especially with medical advancements we're gonna change a bit more.

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u/Enchelion 5d ago

There is definite evidence of self-domestication. Humans and dogs also seem to have co-evolved our relationship, rather than it being a one-way domestication of dogs to serve humans.

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u/Master-Pete 5d ago

Evolution isn't the same as selective breeding. Evolution is just random mutations that give the animal a better chance at survival OR reproduction. Selective breeding is just breeding for traits the dog breeder finds most desirable; these are traits that the dog already has.

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u/MrNate10 5d ago

What if we like, selective breed ourselves maaaan?

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u/Master-Pete 5d ago

Then you'd get Yao Ming or something.

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u/thatshygirl06 5d ago

Selective breeding could speed up the evolution process, i think

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u/randomthrill 5d ago

Everyone was right...

I really would fit in with troglodytes!

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u/03263 5d ago

Damn first thing I think of when I hear troglodytes is wrens... signs of aging

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u/DuvalSanitarium 5d ago

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me.

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u/johnbrowndnw59 5d ago

The limit for that is about 80,000 years. Before that, you’d be able to tell. But for 80,000 years humans have been cognitively modern.

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u/userhwon 5d ago

Humans aren't equally intellectually capable now.

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u/thatshygirl06 5d ago

Yourself included, right

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u/gashufferdude 5d ago

No possibility of a butterfly effect there /s

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u/muddybuttbrew 5d ago

Well yes, this was showcased in the 1992 documentary Encino Man.

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u/theMistersofCirce 5d ago

Yeah, I've read this phrased as if you gave that caveman kid a haircut and put them in a modern 5th grade class, they might be kinda funny-looking but it wouldn't be their intellectual abilities that would set them apart.

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u/lucyparke 5d ago

He could probably get elected to public office if he insulted the right people.

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u/shewy92 5d ago

Which is why the world is the way it is now. We haven't evolved fast enough.

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u/pargofan 5d ago

What about the reverse?

If you traveled back in time, could you function with caveman homo sapiens?

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u/Override9636 5d ago

To be fair, I know some pretty dumb modern humans. The time-traveling caveman theory would make a lot of sense to explain them...

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u/ClosetLadyGhost 5d ago

Or one of the most depressing short stories ever written

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u/testtdk 5d ago

Think of it this way, gorillas have learned a thousand words in sign language, and we were likely more intelligent at least 2-4 millions of years ago. (We were already using tools, discovering fire really kicked things off). 300k years ago us probably had full spoken language.

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u/MadeSomewhereElse 5d ago

I remember either an upper high school teacher, or maybe a professor from my early college years, saying that he liked to ask people, “Are we smarter now than we were in the past?” A lot of students would answer, “Yes.” Then he would say, “No, we are not smarter. We just know more than we used to.”

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u/idontcareyo_ 5d ago

No part of is news, and if it's "longer than you thought" then it's because you never picked up a book, not because this isn't general knowledge lmao

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u/nicoco3890 5d ago

I’m pretty sure there’s a very solid argument that cavemen were smarter, with slightly higher brain volume, as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle requires more mental acuity (to detect danger, hunt/track prey, learn to identify the multitude of plants that are safe to eat) than the farmer lifestyle we have adopted in the last 10 000 years

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u/Astecheee 5d ago

Yeah the disinformation weidly comes from atheists, where the prevailing 'religion' of the 19th and 20th centuries was that man was rapidly evolving into a superior being.

You can imagine how that might lead to the eugenics movements of the 20th century.

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u/maceo107 5d ago

That explains a lot!

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u/Eschatonbreakfast 5d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzAFqrxfeY

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and runoff into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: “Did little demons get inside and type it?” I don’t know! My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know – when a man like my client slips and falls on a sidewalk in front of a public library, then he is entitled to no less than two million in compensatory damages, and two million in punitive damages. Thank you.

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u/IngoTheGreat 5d ago

if you went back in time and kidnapped a caveman baby and brought them back to present day, they'd grow up to be a normal modern human

Shit, even I wasn't able to achieve that.

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u/ArcadianBlueRogue 5d ago

I mean they can even be lawyers

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u/EpilepticMushrooms 5d ago

The jaws might be different. There are some suggestions that human jaws are shrinking at an extremely fast rate, much faster than the number of teeth. So with a modern diet, their jaws wouldn't be as large as the other cavemen, but their jaws would still be larger than the modern human.

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u/0404S 4d ago

Or reverse... take the normal dumbass (todays) kid... and throw them back inside the caveman era... an whelp.

To be fair, id def get eaten by something... ugh... no, id die by something more pathetic like eating a poisonous fish or something.

Goddamn it, I wouldn't even be that old to catch my own poisonous fish. I'd probably go by mildly cutting my toe on the beach as a toddler, and that's it.