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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 3 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.869s | source
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jojobas ◴[18 Jun 24 00:16 UTC] No.40712728[source]▶
The would strongly point to speech developing around that time, but there's no mention of language or speech in the article - odd.
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fritzo ◴[18 Jun 24 03:34 UTC] No.40713823[source]▶
It's unclear tech transfer is speech driven. People can read machines and reason about purpose without natural language. We've all learned tricks from undocumented code. I've learned mechanical tricks poking around scrap yards.
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ysofunny ◴[18 Jun 24 06:08 UTC] No.40714532[source]▶
maybe unclear to you. may I recommend Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. which talks about how text and writing transformed human culture

the point (which I learned from the book) is how writting transformed human culture but did not define it, humans have a pre-literal (i.e. written) culture whose origin is literally really lost to history

I'm saying that tech transfer can absolutely be speech driven, but I admit that text driven technological transfer is in some ways an improved version of oral-only cultural transmision (i.e. knowledge preservation)

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1. jjk166 ◴[18 Jun 24 21:05 UTC] No.40722182[source]▶
No one is denying that tech transfer can be speech driven, but that doesn't mean that this particular increase in tech transfer was because of speech.
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2. EasyMark ◴[19 Jun 24 06:03 UTC] No.40725303[source]▶
Right, but there are certainly going to be a ceiling to how far one can go. With writing it can be copied nearly verbatim and kept for centuries whereas the human mind is brittle and forgets, fuzzes, and randomly changes knowledge, it can contain only so much data.
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3. jjk166 ◴[19 Jun 24 12:39 UTC] No.40727698[source]▶
That ceiling is pretty high above 18 steps for flint knapping.