It's society & available materials.

If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.

Idk, I'm very whelmed by this, warnings weren't needed, sounds just about right.

If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)

Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn't have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves

You've made the assumption that everyone has a unique pair of parents. You've not taken into account that parents can have multiple children.

One of the reasons behind the population boom (but not the only reason by any means) is that infant mortality is so low nowadays. Not that long ago, you could have entire families wiped out by diseases that are now functionally eradicated or easily treatable.

If you assume two children per group of parents survive until adulthood, the population line stays stable. It's because of the massive rise in the number of children reaching adulthood that the population spikes so suddenly.

You're assuming that your matrilineal line is entirely composed of firstborns.

I think you might not be entirely sure what ego is/means. "Egotistical" derived from it, but they're not the same thing.

Otherwise, you're basically just saying what I said.

No that’s not the assumption I made. I said if one living person today had unique parents all the way back. Why would I have to take into account siblings if I’m only looking at the direct lineage.

I also said it’s impossible and inbreeding and pedigree collapse occurred.

25-28 sounds about right for men. For women that seems way to old, 14 is still very young, but around 20-23 was common.

Also keep in mind that a church could bend the truth and just not publish the overlap. You can have a few branches going way back and just be unknown on those that overlap with them.

Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don't mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there's a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.

As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I'm pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.

Exactly. The fact that our kids can look different from us at all is fucking wild

I absolutely agree (I didn't say it wouldn't change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn't be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.

I'm trying to make the distinction between the ability to just 'make' as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn't make sense bcs you don't end up with enough use-cases.

(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).

I absolutely agree (I didn't say it wouldn't change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn't be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.

For everything you need a willing society bcs one individual can't do it all - it's either you dig/build one well & others feed you or you do the efforts communally. Same with metalwork, that's a whole specialisation in the most basic sense (you need a workforce & resources for them to gather ore, work it, and forge anything of useful size - metalwork to produce a few grammes of metal per year isn't worth it, so you need a city-sized community at your disposal, and you need to get to that point ... unless maybe as an expensive way to just pass the knowledge for later gens to put it to good use, which might be successful, unless forgotten or the community doesn't survive).

Animal domestication can take generations too in some cases (bovids), you need to first focus on docile females, and once they stay in a designated area (either like a valley or even fenced fields), you need the resources (food) to keep them alive there. So you need to build up agriculture at scale first. That why we found the first real domestication evidence around ancient cities, not random villages.

I do agree with that!

I don't think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.

The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.

The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.

The wheel isn't some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It's probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it's also useless unless you have roads.

I'm always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.

My grandmother passed away in 2015, but when she was born in 1922, there were Civil War veterans and people who had been owned as slaves still walking around. She was 43 when the Civil Rights Act passed

And the meme is being conservative

If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn't an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don't understand and don't exist. You can't do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn't have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.

Tbf, it was also far more common for people to have a shitload of kids, which takes time and thus would mean the mother was a fair bit older for the youngest few. My grandma was the youngest of 12 and her mother was well into her 40s when she was born.

That's mostly gene mixing though.

If you had your child alone (a clone), they would look quite exactly like you. It would take several generations to see a change.

You just start with math, there's plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-"invent". After that people would start taking you more seriously

Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn't want to go that route

I'm not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn't mean they got married at exactly this age -- it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.

This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it's far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.

I'm not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren't necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa (Niger in particular has an average of 7 births per woman) meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.

Average reported marriage age of women in Niger is 19... I've lived there, and in the village, it's 15 or 16. I have seen 9 year olds get "married" but it was really more like a reservation to get real married when she's 15 or so. Even using official stats, 1 kid before 20 and 3 or 4 kids before age 25 is very achievable.

I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers there who didn't think anything of it. They're 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.

I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.

Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.

The guy on the primitive technology channel smelled iron from orange bacteria. He used 3 different methods with his most complex tools being stone and clay. Copper and tin are generally easier, and are exposed on the surface in many areas. The only thing stopping people from figuring out bronze earlier was location and luck. I think the bronze age starting 7000 years earlier would have had an impact.

I know how to make black powder, and generally know how to source it. Between that and bronze, you could have guns over 11000 years earlier than we did.

I've built houses.

I know the basics of making paper. Even if I didn't, clay tablets are easy. Writing 4000 years earlier would necessarily advance knowledge if nothing else happened. Throw in some math and the concept of zero and you could advance knowledge in those areas by thousands of years. Math isn't relevant? Some of the oldest structures we have around use math and astronomy. Imagine if we had those 5000 years earlier.

One of the bigger reasons people don't learn more languages is because they don't have the time or interest. One of the best ways to learn is immersion. Being in a situation where you have to learn a new language if you want to communicate with anyone else would certainly be a motivator to put in the effort.

Yeah, if I was going to jump start domestication, I'd start with chickens or sheep/goats. Chicken and goats can eat just about anything, so can be fed scraps and quickly become a net positive. They're also smaller and easier to manage than cows. Goats can be troublesome, but their risk is limited by their size.

Domestication on both those species started about 10000 years ago, so it would only speed things up by 2000 years.

Yeah, when we're talking about a 12000 year span and your references don't go past the last thousand, it isn't very representative. Relevant, certainly, but do you think that had much bearing in ancient Egypt? And that only gets us halfway through the time span we're talking about.

10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.

I can go on but in short there's loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.

That's not to say that some of these cities weren't huge though. Rome had ~750K at it's peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.

https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html

Smart, but you would need to be in specific area to get chickens (south Asia?) & goats (middle East?) suitable for domestication, which would still take several human generations to achieve - so in your lifetime you would just pass the knowledge (in case someone was interested) but otherwise live your life without seeing the results.

It's not like livestock domestication didn't start about asap after there were conditions for it (cities, stable food production, some bureaucracy/specialisation/trade, etc)etc.

How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?

(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn't do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)

You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?

Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?

Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?

I can go on but in short there's loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.

I absolutely agree with that.

Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don't have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That's stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.

I wonder if that's true. Kings also had the best possible medical care (of their time), and ate very well. OTOH, the inbreeding probably hurt their longevity.

Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.

It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.

Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn't available.

Still, if you're a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.

First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary

From some book of Murphy's laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with

That's a lot, but also not. I know my grandmother and know of her mother but beyond that no idea who they were beyond where they were from.

We assume my ancestors are all from the same place (Alligator rivers) but going back that far it just seems so slim we're not from elsewhere too

Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and... not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).

Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven't done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people's lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn't even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn't exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.

For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don't want to.

The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they'll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you'd have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).

Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of "infinite™" growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).

Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That's why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn't necessary be of use.)

The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that's from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I'm not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don't have a forge.

Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that's common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I'd be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.

I've seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.

I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.

But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd be banned or worse.

Actually, this math is almost exactly how the young earth creationist cult came to their number for the age of the earth. The counted out all the begats in the Bible from Adam to Jesus and multiplied by an average amount of time between births.

Huge for that time, sure... But we've had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.

True, but a lot of cities that we think of as big are around those numbers. They couldn't get much bigger because of infrastructure.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states

Seattle is about 800k https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/washington/seattle

That's why I said tin and copper are easier. There were locations with native copper deposits, much like finding gold in streams. Copper is easier to work, tin is pretty easy relatively speaking, and the two give you bronze, which allows proper tools. That's part of why it took about 2000 years after bronze before we had iron. The guy from Primitive Technology is working from a very poor ore source (and is actually doing trial and error). That said, I doubt you could get much more than the idea of iron accepted by a Neolithic culture in a lifetime.

Sure, I've built houses using modern tools, but I'm also aware of the techniques used in older wood buildings. I could be an adequate apprentice for the first house I built, and could build a second on my own.

I didn't say gun powder, I said black powder. It's far simpler and safer. I made some before I was a teenager. The hardest part is finding saltwater and the only tool you need is a mortar and pestle. If they didn't exist by 10000 BC, then I could "invent" that, too.

Can confirm. My great grandma told me she got married at 18 which made her an "old maid" at the time

ate very well

Too well. Gout, obesity, food poisoning, alcohol, and so on took plenty before someone else could kill them.

Seattle could have a lot higher population if it wasn’t obsessed with single family homes and actually rezoned for high occupancy lower income housing. Not even “low income” just lower considering a 1-2 bedroom house can run into the millions in Seattle

We’ve cloned cats and had them come out with different markings, genes aren’t that simple

But they don't have a single kid, so the average age when giving birth is maybe higher

Idk, they had kids a lot earlier than 25 for the vast, vast majority of world history.

Even crazier if you think in human lifetimes. Taking the global life expectancy of 72 years, the beginning of our era was 28 lifetimes ago.

Middle Ages ended 8 lifetimes ago.

Yeah but you're comparing the 18th largest city in the US to what were at the time the largest cities in the world. Apples to oranges. Why not compare Rome's 700k to say.. Shanghai? There's 25 million people in the city proper. Just one city. The population of the Han Empire, recorded in the tax census of 156 AD, was 50.6 million people in 12,366,470 households. The entire empire could now fit in 2 cities.