Whenever this stuff comes up I try to remind people that we only get to see a tiny little glimpse of what these folks were up to. Folks look at the stone tools that have only been found after their owners were done with them and left them in the ground for eons, and imagine that in general everything was “rough” and “crude.”

We don’t get to see the overwhelming majority of their craft — there’s no doubt a whole world of wood and leather artistry and so on that don’t get to survive. Humans are clever, adaptable and often times really fucking obsessive. That same instinct that makes one spend hundreds of hours on Factorio was around in prehistory, applying itself to whatever.

I often times hear anthropologists speculate that large stone handaxes were a means of seduction — that the girls would have swooned over the guys who were better able to make more effective tools. I know too many nerds to believe this. I think that back then, there were people who kept obsessing over making finer tools and theorizing about designs and where materials could be found, and it was about as sexually appealing as my homelab. Which is to say, absolutely fucking not, but who cares, I want to tell you about my idea for a subnet optimized to allow doomcoder agents to handle their own infra needs

They had some kind of "microlithic" architecture.

Slightly unrelated but the proliferation of LLMs has totally thrown off my own Turing Test when reading comments online. I wonder if people are speaking more like LLMs too?

modern humans be here for atleast 200k years. why would we only use tools in the last half if we have developed brains already.

there is tons of evidences of tool use etc. way before this date. its just filtered out because people used to be fired, ridiculed and pushed out of the scientific community if they would say anything that challenge some big names. Archeology was especially toxic in that regard....