Comment · Thu, December 27, 2012
Engraved stone dating back 30,000 years found in China. Incisions imply possibility of counting or recording?
What they were answering
American_Pig · 6 points
I think you are underestimating the scale of the skill set hunter gatherers need to have in order to survive. The average hunter gatherer from this period would need to be able to recognize hundreds if not thousands of different types of plants, track and hunt game, construct shelters, educate children, build tools and weapons and watercraft, skin and butcher animals, sew clothing, fish, and assess new environments (if nomadic). In addition to navigating a social world with politics and power struggles, and passing on mythologies and musical and artistic and healing traditions. In our society, most of these tasks are delegated to specialists. Back then, in smaller scale societies, people would have had to do them themselves. That's a huge amount of neuronal stimulation right there we are missing. You also imply they would have been nutritionally deficient. I'm not aware of any evidence of wide spread nutritional deficiencies before the advent of agriculture.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Thanks for the specific response. Perhaps I am understating the amount of neuronal activity that survival activities instigate. However, I was more speaking to the type of intelligence that modern societies value. We also are learning how to supplement for our brains to operate more efficiently that were never understood before. Nootropic supplements are one area of study that is proving vast amounts of information on not only how to treat mental disorders like Parkinson's, but also enhancing the cognition of healthy people. We are not just passively observing our reactions anymore. We are driving the advancement in understanding and control of our brains on a neurochemical level. My comment about nutritional deficiencies is slightly speculative. We know ancient civilizations like the Mayans and Egyptians were nutritionally deficient. However, I am not sure about hunter/gatherer societies. Given what I know about nutrition, I just don't see how someone could get all the nutritional supplementation they needed from a specific region alone. Not all the foods they would have easy access to would have all the nutrients. Even most modern humans in the US are slightly deficient in many things like B12, D, and magnesium. Not to mention, prehistoric humans did not have the knowledge of what substance they needed to have their brains operate efficiently, so how could they have known what substances to eat and when? So yes, it's speculative. However, I just don't see it not being a factor. Perhaps someone who is more educated in the field can chime in with some specifics.