<story><title>Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece</title><url>https://www.livescience.com/byzantine-warrior-fractured-jaw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.&lt;p&gt;And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it&amp;#x27;s apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity&amp;#x27;s existence.&lt;p&gt;So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I&amp;#x27;m simplifying a very great deal.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MichaelZuo</author><text>Anatomically modern vocal chords only developed sometime between ~80000 to ~40000 BCE. So although that’s still quite a lot of time, it’s less than what is implied with cranial structure.&lt;p&gt;It’s actually surprising how late and relatively sudden vocal chords developed compared to the rest of the body, as what ‘humans’ had prior was totally incapable of modern speech. It’s an unresolved mystery I believe.</text></comment>
<story><title>Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece</title><url>https://www.livescience.com/byzantine-warrior-fractured-jaw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s not be completely shocked by capable, ingenious ancestors. Even in the ~190K years before we settled down, those people had brains identical to yours and mine.&lt;p&gt;And on the other hand, if you read some pre-Enlightenment things, it&amp;#x27;s apparent just how powerful (actual, accurate) knowledge and reason are. Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. Imagine that the very basics of what we know and how we think today were out there, and we had the brains, but the knowledge was mostly undeveloped for ~199,000 of the 200,000 years of humanity&amp;#x27;s existence.&lt;p&gt;So it takes more than brains. (Yes, I&amp;#x27;m simplifying a very great deal.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>streamofdigits</author><text>&amp;gt; So it takes more than brains.&lt;p&gt;yep, it takes society. Newton&amp;#x27;s law is not Newton&amp;#x27;s law, its a mental state of a bunch of communicating homo sapiens. Had he died of a pandemic somebody else would have &amp;quot;discovered&amp;quot; it in a decade or two.</text></comment>