> "Anthropologists are simply realizing that early cities took extremely diverse forms. "Clearly, urbanism is different in different parts of the world, and we need to be more flexible in how we define this," he explained. The tropics demonstrate that where we draw the lines of agriculture and urbanism can be very difficult to determine."
It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural history, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc we begin to reach conclusions similar to the above. Wow, this is much more complex than we thought it was. I find this in my own life as I explore socio-political topics also - it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?
Yes, in the sense that cross-discipline study sometimes reveals common themes. One field having complex dynamics might make the world seem complicated. When many fields have the same complex dynamics, you start to wonder if there's something simple you can tease out of it.
Are you sure your digging deep enough? I have seen plenty of cases where different fields seemed to share a theme. But, the details always diverged on closer inspection, limiting the value of the comparison.
To stretch an analogy stacking blocks seems like you can add the heights, except the weight of the stack deforms them, so addition is misleading.
At some level one can think of anything as unique, but it's often more useful to consider in what way two (or many) things are similar.
We've got a bit of a dialectic:
Thesis -- The map is not the territory.
Antithesis -- There's nothing so practical as a good theory.
Synthesis -- Use a subway map when catching the train, use a topographical map when doing flood planning, etc.
Taking it back to programming, all abstractions are leaky in some way. A good software engineer uses the right abstraction for the task, knowing that it might be wrong for a different task.
Human themes (archaeology, art, architecture, urban development, etc) share the commonality of the human. As we learn more about general themes driving our psyche and human groups general themes start to emerge. Of course, the emergent behavior of human societies is really complex. I like Noel Harari's "Sapiens" as he really strives to find the high level themes in humanitys development.
IMO, if a topic sounds overtly complex and focuses on a legion arbitrary seeming minutiae and, most crucially, you can't find the empiric or mathematical root cause for this complexity it's likely the direction of study is more or less bogus and based on academic eminence rather than evidence.
Urban development really is it's own thing dominated by transportation systems, wealth, waste management etc. The complex math is vital and independent from other human constructs. Architecture was often influenced by the tax code, climate, material property's etc so again the details really are important and separate from everything else.
Now, sure the boundarys around a field gets fuzzy and sculpture and architecture are both influenced by the human visual system so there is overlap. But, that's not a shared theme that's D.C. and Baltimore being next to each other and sharing a few suburbs at one end, but not all suburbs.
Example: kelvin-helmholtz instabilities, applicable in dynamics ranging from vascular systems to cloud formations to interstellar nebulae, and so much more.
> this is much more complex than we thought it was.
> it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?
This is the very tension between Platonism with its emphasis on unity and Aristotelianism which sees complex diversity everywhere. How can we get these two systems to work together? How can we have both unity and diversity?
And now you know where the word "university" comes from.
(Who says all those history and philosophy classes were a waste of time? Besides me, I mean.)
I've always seen things as having a 'level of abstraction'. At one level of abstraction things can have unity, but as you 'zoom in' and change the level of abstraction you'll see the differences and have diversity.
From a distance stars and snowflakes all look the same, but not on closer inspection. Similarly in a foreign country, at first people will all seem the same, but as you spend more time there you level of abstraction changes and you start to see greater diversity.
Since you can zoom in/out infinitely there's no correct level of abstraction to start from or accept as a default, therefore things have great unity and diversity, simultaneously.
It has happened in the history of science that people found an elegant theory unifying seemingly disparate phenomena. Or, while learning a subject, it may seem really complicated and confusing, and later, once you have learned it, it may seem simple. But I'm not sure if you would count either of these examples. Can you provide a description of what a counterexample might look like even if it is made up?
While I studied engineering, it was common to get in spats with lefty liberal-arts types, who always brought everything around to talk of class, rich vs. poor, and so on. I mainly read The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and so on, so I thought this perspective was reductionist and overly simplistic, when reality was much more complex, a mostly net-beneficial process where foul-play was a relatively minor factor.
After graduation, when I started working, I had time to read more history and philosophy, learned more about my own domain of expertise, learned how the professional world worked, and also caught up with much more current events. Turns out I now feel like those critics were more-or-less right all along.
I still have issues with the way some issues were introduced to me originally, but ultimately I was just very reluctant to accept that there was basically a full-on class war I was blissfully ignorant of.
My experience coming from very disenfranchised community and going to a good school was that there is class warfare and it is a big deal, and the amount of people I know who got jail time for car and housing fines is depressing and disgusting yet the college liberal group still go overboard with thinking everything is racism and classism.
Here's enough TLDR so that my comment makes sense: In the tropics, the distinction between agriculture and hunter-gathering less sharp than in temperate climates. Thus early signs of tropical agriculture (from 20-30 kyears ago) pre-date the traditionally understood rise of agriculture about 9 kyears ago).
This confirms my Sri Lankan bemusement at the term "temperate climate". The tropics can be a PITA in many ways, but they have no shortage of biomass. Subsistence gardens abound and are productive. Even more than in other gardens, the issue is less to make things grow, but to stop the wrong things from growing. It's hardly surprising if ancient jungle dwellers long ago to tilted nature's bounty in their direction.
But I do take exception to the somewhat hippy-dippy claim that ..."colonial, industrial societies" came from outside the tropics and tried "to practice monoculture, pastoralism, and urbanism within them." Those "evils" took place in the tropics for thousands of years before western colonialists turned up.
When I was growing up, things seemed pretty much settled. We knew where the first humans came from, we knew when and where agriculture started, we even had 9 planets in our solar system.
This was the truths scientists had discovered and it was unquestionable. It was printed in books to last forever.
But you grow up, and you realize that these things are malleable. It's more like as of 1998, Lucy is the oldest human remains we discovered, using x method.
I'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything, but I think we should leave a little wiggle room in the way we make these statements from now on.
Though I haven't read a history or science book from a school curriculum in years so I can't say if that's already what is being done.
University is where you learn that almost everything in school books is over simplified, out of date, or (periodically) just plain wrong.
One of the benefits of having researchers teaching is that they have a better understanding of both the content and dynamics of their field. This is far different from primary and secondary schools, where teachers are usually teaching outside of their discipline. Even a high school physics teacher with a science degree is likely to be a biologist or a chemist by training.
Of course, there are a multitude of other differences with university educations. For example: governments don't set the curriculum, which is hugely beneficial for fields like history. (Governments have a nasty desire to set the historical narrative.)
Yeah, absolute statements like "the science is settled" are rather unscientific. Good science must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, and leave the door open to being proven wrong.
Good science relies on tested data- and this tested data stays the same. The rules derived from it, may become more detailed - or in some cases even completely overthrown with a new ruleset, which will provide a reference frame that can produce such data.
Best example for science is the Newton Physics, which allowed for pretty close calculations on planetary movements.
The data gathered stayed the same, but the unexplained edge-cases and small deviations, where better explained by Einsteins theory.
Science never settles anything, it's why it's such a successful idea. "Current evidence says the world is about 13.8 billion years old" is the way I would word that. With your method, a later revision says science was wrong, when it just didn't have enough evidence.
It makes a difference whether you're speaking pragmatically or philosophically. Since we live in a practical universe, there are facts of science that are so well established that there is no reason to doubt them. And many facts that aren't as well established.
I know in this practical universe, Newton's laws of physics and Einstein's views of quantum physics were both at one point "facts" but later shown to be mere approximations and both of them worth being doubted. There's no point to having science if all we are going to do is assume everything that comes out of the process as the gospel.
The known universe was 13.7 billion years old until a couple years ago. Either way, we're still talking +/- tens of millions of years with 68% confidence. At 95%, the interval is something closer to a billion years. Unless they've tightened it up since I last read about it when the 13.8 figure came out...
It's like that point in school where you're quite good at algebra but haven't been introduced to calculus yet, and for the last time ever, you're fully confident that you understand all of mathematics.
This isn't exactly news. Archaeologists have known this for awhile, though it's maybe not part of popular thought. We have populations on earth that live as Paleolithic peoples elsewhere once did, and they cultivate plants.
The importance of the Neolithic Revolution was the population explosion that came with easily harvested grain in a hospitable environment and the resultant freeing up of labour to create more complex societies and technologies.
The tropics being the tropics (lots of plant growth), it was probably difficult to do such studies before the era of satellites and lidar that is able to penetrate the forests and topsoil to reveal just what was hidden.
Going forward, we'll probably learn much more about the practice of ancient agriculture and hunter-gathering societies in tropical regions.
BTW, Paleontology has a similar problem. Most fossils are found in deserts or as part of construction work simply because they are easier to find in those areas. There are probably as many fossils buried in tropical regions but the difficulty of digging through the tropical forests to find them limits the number of fossils found.
Yes, some of the things mentioned as new ideas were discussed years ago. Like the idea that some primitive form of plant domestication may have been happening prior to the agricultural revolution of 9000-10000 years ago.
That's fantastic for them, I guess. It doesn't mean it was unique. It might just be me, but the idea that ancient peoples were so dumb that figuring out how to grow some plants was a miraculous idea that only happened once in one specific part of the world . . . come on. The ethnocentrism with that idea is glaring.
As far I know, the classic knowledge was that agriculture raised nearly at same time from the fertile crescent & Egipt, China, Indus valley and central America.
I read about Gobekli tepe. It's a interesting ruins, not only because are very old. Also, shows a very advanced knowdlege about how sculpt stones. Take a look to the animal scupts on the stones. They are very detailed. They look really advanced for being too old.
Another interesting old ruins are :
- Yonaguni Monument . The last time that this ruins was over the water was 9000 years ago!
- Sumerged ruins of Gulf of Khambhat . Very old cities of Indus valley that are from 7000-9000 years. And if I remember correctly there was a urbanized zone big as new york itself!
- Tiwanaku . Where we can found something like a mass produced stones with a really awesome quality. Look like these pre-incan culture discovered Ford's production chain and apply over standarized stones that can put like a gigant lego, and not need any kind of cement to stay together!
The real truth is that we don't know very well these ancient eras. We assume that our ancestors must be more stupid that ours. But this is false. They are equal capable that any actual person. We only, don't know how they did it, or when (exactly) they did something or how many times something was rediscovered.
Note that the editor highlighted that this didn't mean that they had farms at the time, the editor identifies this finding more as "proto-agriculture" or before what could be considered farming.
It seems that the more humans learn about any topic: our own agricultural history, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc we begin to reach conclusions similar to the above. Wow, this is much more complex than we thought it was. I find this in my own life as I explore socio-political topics also - it seems the deeper one dives into any topic the more difficult it is to, as the article says, "draw the lines". Has anybody experienced an intellectual exploration to the contrary?