Outside of advanced technology have humans changed in the last 5,000 years?

fuzzybuddy

fuzzybuddy

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Somehow, I got fascinated with Ancient Egypt. Once you get past the Pyramids, this guy was sleeping with that guy's wife, someone stole something, this person couldn't get along with that person, etc, etc. That was around 5,000 years ago. Do you think we're still the same basic humans? Underneath the electronics and technology, have we changed?
 

A major difference

Hacettepe University Anthropology Department lecturer Professor Yılmaz Selim Erdal said the examinations on the skeletons revealed that people lived to 40 years of age 5,000 years ago. “The life expectancy of the Early Bronze Age and its contemporaries is around 35-40 years. Infant and child mortality is very high.Sep 7, 2021
 
Technology, tools, and money. We have had to adapt to those inventions we made. We are different in that we have loads of problems we didn't have back then. But we also have many things that help us that they didn't have way back then. We didn't drive?
 
Knight said:
Hacettepe University Anthropology Department lecturer Professor Yılmaz Selim Erdal said the examinations on the skeletons revealed that people lived to 40 years of age 5,000 years ago. “The life expectancy of the Early Bronze Age and its contemporaries is around 35-40 years. Infant and child mortality is very high.Sep 7, 2021
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Sure, we live longer now but that doesn't reflect a change. It' an artifact of nutrition and health care and an easier life in general. Many of the biological clocks of the human body have not changed.

For example carrying a child at 35 is still medically a "geriatric pregnancy" and most women have few or no viable eggs left by 40. Trying to deny that is why IVF is becoming so common now, and even when that "takes" the occurrence of birth defects is high.

So while we live beyond 40 now it really isn't in our nature. It's a bit like trying to keep those Pacific salmon alive after they have spawned and all of their clocks begin to stop.

We haven't changed. We go on now but unnaturally, almost as zombies.
 
We worry more about hygiene and hair removal today. :)


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Homo sapiens have undergone rapid evolutionary change in limited ways over the last 8000 years, since civilizations first arose.



Although not often public discussed because it can be Politically Incorrect, most dramatic has been the facial attractiveness of women and strength of men. Consider how greatly facial attractiveness varies between regions with wealthy of civilizations versus humans eeking out survival for tens of thousands of years in aboriginal villages. Not just in isolated areas, but world wide across isolated continents as the powerful preyed on peasants.

That is the result of powerful and wealthy overlords selectively mating with the most physically and mentally attractive women. That accelerated greatly in Europe during the last two millennium especially in the Middle Ages due to a vast market for kidnapped women by slave traders especially into Moslem harem concubines, maritime Italian slave markets, and warmongering lords needing armies. One needs to understand slave trading was enormous during centuries of the Roman Empire.

That noted, anywhere overlords (ie kings, nobles) dominated regions, they also probably sought out within their domains, the most attractive women and strongest largest men while peasants had little power.

This all began during the Uruk period in Mesopotamia and then spread by evil overlords with power. I'll also speculate, that may be why moral alien UIEs if Earth is one of their zoos as I suspect, may have become quietly involved in trying to change human behaviors via religion. Well at least until science and technology arose as they would no longer be able to do so secretly.

Venetian slave trade - Wikipedia


Black Sea slave trade - Wikipedia
 
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I have wondered a few times if you traveled back in time, say 5000 years for the sake of this discussion, and you brought a young child back to the 21st Century and enrolled him in school and then provided him with a college education, would he grasp technology on the average level of a college grad? Basically, I'm wondering if his brain would be as well developed as person of today. How well would he compete in sports?

Three hundred years ago, Europeans were introduced to Native Americans who were still living in the Stone Age. That's a pretty big gulf that makes 5000 years ago seem like nothing. 60 years ago, I went to college in Montana where Native Americans were also attending. Granted, not a lot of them, but the ones who were there were doing just fine.

Of course both cultures had been evolving in only slightly different ways since the stone age, so the only difference that would probably stand out would be the difference in the size of their scientific knowledge base, at least as it would have been 300 years ago. I doubt that man has changed much in 5000 years. Evolution doesn't happen that fast, and humans haven't been around very long compared to the prehistoric heavy hitters like dinosaurs and turtles, who spanned an existence lasting thousands of times longer than us.

This is an interesting topic to speculate on.
 
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For any that believe leaders of Christian or Moslem religions were being inspired by gods or intelligent entities, one won't if they read the Black Sea slave trade link above that indicates how entrenched among leaders of human societies and religions, such shameful practices had become. The utterly disgusting African slave trade that happened in the Americas was just the tip of a much older wealth driven slave trade that has been culturally shielded from most modern Western citizens because it is so shameful.

As for @JustDave question, my expectation is even aboriginal humans if brought up as children and educated the same as those of elites in the Western World, would on average tend to be capable of nearly as much raw intelligence because of the way our neocortex brains develop mainly from nurture not nature. Our individual human intelligence is not as once thought mostly a result of DNA but rather what we fill our brains with that via neural plasticity processes determines how intelligent one becomes. DNA is important but not as much as how any person develops their own mind.

How To Create Mind by Ray Kurzweil:

...There are about a half million cortical columns in a human neocortex, each occupying a space about 2 millimeters high and a half millimeter wide and containing 60,000 neurons (resulting in a total of about 30 billion neurons in the neocortex). A rough estimate is that each pattern recognizer within a cortical column contains about 100 neurons, so there are on the order of 300 million pattern recognizers in total in the neocortex.

From birth our brains via natural processes of experience and motor actions, add and prune away pattern recognizer interconnections between neurons dendrites to axons, and that is what primarily determines one's developed intelligence.
 
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fuzzybuddy said:
I think we are the same basic humans as over 5,000 years ago. We are better fed, have better medical care, and better educated.
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But we are still the immature,self-absorbed, envious, society we have always been. If this true, we haven't learned anything.
 
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