The Real Dark Ages For Humans Lasted Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years. There is something about the human race which I have always thought was mysterious. When scientists first dated the time modern humans came about they said it was something like fifty thousand to one hundred thousand years ago. I thought to myself, how could it have taken so long for humans to advance to what we are today? Now we find there is proof humans were living in a cave for about two hundred thousands years and that started about four hundred thousand years ago. That pushes back the date for modern humans back that far. Will we eventually find even older proof modern humans were around longer? These humans were said to be very advanced and controlled fire, preserved food and did a couple of other things. What is more important to me is the fact for the two hundred thousand years they were using the cave, they never seemed to advance any further. How could humans settle for this life without trying to make things better? Actually, for the most part of those four hundred thousand years we did nothing new and that is what is so hard for me to imagine. Now that I am clear about what I was talking about, what changed us and got us to want to discover and invent things? Was there some sort of change in our brains? Human brain fossils almost are impossible to find because the soft tissue doesn’t survive. The one or two we have found don’t date back very far. There is the Heslington brain which dates back to between 673 and 482 B.C. One very strange thing has happened to our brains, they are not as big as they were three thousand years ago. How much brain matter have we lost? It has been suggested we lost about the size of a ping pong ball. Scientists were surprised at how recent this was. I just want to say it doesn’t seem there is a relationship which can be defined if we compare brain size to intelligence. An interesting fact is our bodies have also become smaller on average. We talk about the Dark Age, that that was only a tiny drop in the bucket of time and if we compare it to the hundreds of thousands of years where we did hardly anything new it would have been like a super advanced civilization compared to those cave dwellers. For hundreds of thousands of years, it seems all we did was hunt, have families and survive. Sure, we learned how to cook food but why couldn’t we have learned more? One would think that even by mistake, ideas for simple inventions would have come forth. Why didn’t we figure out over all that time how to create medical instruments to treat some wounds? There must have been injuries and in that primitive environment, many of them. You have to wonder how many people died in those times from these injuries which were caused by animals, accident and diseases. I have to wonder how long it was before humans stopped using rocks as weapons. Most experts think the first non-stone weapon was the wooden club. It is thought one of the first weapons made, or even the very first which was not just a stone, was the spear and it has been dated back four hundred sixty thousand years ago. That is before the age of the modern humans, or so we think, but the date for modern humans is constantly being pushed back. Previously that date had been two hundred thousand years later. The invention of the spear probably was a Neanderthal invention which was adapted by modern humans. It is thought the bow and arrow was invented by modern, humans but didn’t appear until sixty-one thousand years ago. It is hard to believe we could not have figured out the bow and arrow way before that time, it would have revolutionized hunting. What is amazing about the bow and arrow is it is still around today, and more deadly than ever. The basic bow and arrow didn’t change too much over many thousands of years. It could have been over fifty-five thousand years before meaningful changes were made to it. It is hard to know what were the cultural norms when modern humans came on the scene. We shared the earth with the Neanderthals who were around a long time with us. They didn’t disappear until about fifty thousand years ago. It could turn out they were more advanced than modern humans for a while. We know some modern humans mated with Neanderthals because we have found Neanderthal DNA in many races on earth today. What we don’t know is, were these relationships peaceful, or the result of rape and war? We did find evidence modern humans and Neanderthals shared the same caves at around the same time. We also found evidence that some Neanderthal tribes were cannibals, but it seems the majority were not. There might also have been human cannibals, but we don’t seem to know. I have to think if we took a group of modern humans today and stuck them on an island with nothing, they would invent some things or at least reconstruct them from memory. I am not talking about building television sets or anything like that, but simple inventions which might help them in agriculture in some way. Why didn’t those modern humans who lived many hundred of thousands of years ago discover agriculture, they had plenty of time to do it. While human brains back when we first evolved on the planet were not much different size wise, up to 3,000 years ago, their brains might have been wired differently. The part of the brain which covers innovation may have been closed off. When I talk about different wiring I have to think of Albert Einstein. He was a genius with an I.Q. of 160. Sure, that is genius, but he did things which seemed to be far beyond that I.Q. A woman named Marilyn vos Savant, was tested in 1956 and had the incredible I.Q. of 228. If one believes I.Q. is the most important part of intelligence she should have been able to change the world. We just don’t know enough about people who lived so long ago and we may never find out much more about them. We have only archeological evidence and sometimes that is very scarce. Then the scientists apply their opinions about what they found and we have no guarantee they are correct in their assumptions.
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