<story><title>Why human societies developed so little during 300k years</title><url>https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac</author><text>The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions.  &lt;i&gt;Right now&lt;/i&gt; there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings.  The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.  So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).&lt;p&gt;In other words, I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mmoskal</author><text>I was really interested in seeing what&amp;#x27;s the % of years of human live lived in different historical periods. I wrote a script [0] and it turns out [1], 90% of time was lived after the agricultural revolution (last 10k years) and 50% of time was lived in the last 1000 years. 10% of time was lived in my lifetime!&lt;p&gt;Now, when we talk about different measures of progress the number above understate the dominance of recent history. For most of human history average life expectancy was 10-12 years, so most of these years lived were as children. Also, ignoring the first 10% of hunter-gatherer years, most of the time most people were working in agriculture with very little surplus to do anything else.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;mmoskal&amp;#x2F;b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a234e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;mmoskal&amp;#x2F;b6d8d2c73ec4fe56df9714d8435a...&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;mmoskal&amp;#x2F;58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7e715&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;mmoskal&amp;#x2F;58e7c9ee4d716f91f1e7438660b7...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why human societies developed so little during 300k years</title><url>https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-still</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrac</author><text>The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions.  &lt;i&gt;Right now&lt;/i&gt; there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings.  The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands.  So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not).&lt;p&gt;In other words, I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dopidopHN</author><text>Agriculture took roughly 5000 years to be adopted.&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it can be qualified of fast.&lt;p&gt;Their was back and forth and things did not change rapidly for the better automagically.&lt;p&gt;For milenaries, hunter gathered were better fed than village dweller ( from bones structures and trash analysis)&lt;p&gt;Source : Grabber &amp;amp; scott. Mostly “against the grain” and “debt, a history”</text></comment>