Why did everything take so long?
One of the biggest intuitive mysteries to me is how humanity took so long to do anything....MORE
Humans have been ‘behaviorally modern’ for about 50 thousand years. And apparently didn’t invent, for instance:
This kind of thing seems really weird introspectively, because it is hard to imagine going a whole lifetime in the wilderness without wanting something like rope, or going a whole day wanting something like rope without figuring out how to make something like rope. Yet apparently people went for about a thousand lifetimes without that happening.
- rope until 28 thousand years ago.
- the wheel until at least 4000BC
- writing until 3000BC
- woodblock printing until 200AD
Some possible explanations:
- Inventions are usually more ingenious than they seem. LiveScience argues that it took so long to invent the wheel because “The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It’s figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.” I feel like that would explain why it took a month rather than a day. But a couple of thousand lifetimes?...
