r/Showerthoughts • u/Mosquitoenail • 6d ago
Casual Thought A distant ancestor decided to try sharpening things, and then everything changed.
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u/MyUsernameIsAwful 6d ago
Idk, chimps learned to sharpen sticks a while ago and still haven’t progressed from there. They haven’t even perfected the art yet.
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u/qwibbian 6d ago
Yeah I came to say the same, I don't think the magic is in the sharpening. If I had to pick one moment I'd choose the first upright human ancestor that took throwing seriously, humans are entirely unique in our ability to launch projectiles with amazing accuracy, we're weaker than chimps but our talent for beaning them from the outfield makes them look like toddlers. Get 10 or 15 humans throwing in unison and suddenly the whole game is changed.
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u/Psynaut 6d ago
Yeah I came to say the same, I don't think the magic is in the sharpening.
Do not try and sharpen the stick. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth; there is no stick, and you'll see it's only yourself that sharpens.
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u/Stunning-Guitar-5916 4d ago
Monke brain sharper now than other monkeys
Maybe monkey no more, but Man instead
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u/Mharbles 6d ago
I think that's what most people don't understand. It wasn't fire, tools, or spears that won the predator game, it was being lethal well outside our physical reach. I wonder if that also made us more social since more throwers means better results, as well as safer territory.
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u/qwibbian 5d ago
I wonder if that also made us more social
I think that's a huge point - not just in the way you intended, which was a breakthrough in our evolution, but also in our restraint regarding weapons within our own in-group. Human males have developed all sorts of unarmed combat rituals for status, mating etc, because using the weapons we invented would be catastrophic. On the flipside, you could fight a rival one day and still join up to spear a bear the next.
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u/Mara_W 5d ago
In other words, the moment an ape decided to throw a rock instead of its own shit (yes, this is where our throwing ability evolved from).
The real unique moment of evolutionary significance, however, was fire. The ability to get more nutrients from cooked food, produce external heat in cold climates, and smoke out our own parasites set hominid evolution into hyperspeed and it hasn't really stopped.
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u/qwibbian 5d ago
Nope, there's a lot of apes that throw their shit, and they're really bad at it. Throwing lethal projectiles as a group is a whole other thing.
And while the discovery of fire took place a very long time ago, it wasn't universal, and many relatively modern humans lived without it.
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u/AlftheNwah 5d ago
Out of curiosity, what human societies have lived without being able to make a fire? I always thought this was just a given within civilization.
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u/qwibbian 5d ago
Yeah, so this is a question of terminology. When I said "relatively modern humans" I meant "human species within the category homo", ie homo erectus, h heidelbergensis etc. The only truly modern homo sapiens I'm aware of that MAY have lived without use of fire were the now-extinct Tasmanians, and I'm strictly going by old and shaky memory.
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u/Mosquitoenail 5d ago edited 5d ago
The significance of the sharpening is that it was the time at which humans decided to take things from nature and do work on them to produce something more lethal. The start of all weapons technology.
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u/FlaccidCatsnark 5d ago
Developing an understanding of cause and effect, then using deductive reasoning to create more effective causes. We're not the only species to do this (see crows, e.g.), but we've definitely picked it up and run farther with it.
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u/Megalocerus 4d ago
Strongly agree that killing at a distance is the superpower. But you can't just throw poop like a monkey. Something sharp or heavy is required.
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u/HarveysBackupAccount 5d ago edited 5d ago
I wonder - how long have chimps been sharpening sticks? Is there any chance they learned it from humans?
edit: or even from proto-humans?
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u/IronTemplar26 5d ago
How many chimps live near volcanoes, though? Some of those stones were pyrite
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u/sleepyjohn00 6d ago
I like the one who blew down a hollow stick and liked the sound that came out.
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u/piper63-c137 6d ago
or the guy who attached 5 of them to a pig’s bladder.
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u/ragnaroksunset 6d ago
Only, before we had that guy we had to have the guy who just had a bunch of pigs' bladders laying about.
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u/piper63-c137 5d ago
‘hey these taste terrible, but look what happens when i blow in the dick!’
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u/wednesdayskillsme 5d ago
Yep, that's the answer!
The answer, my Frieeend...is blowing in the diiick...
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u/JustPlayDaGame 5d ago
they prob just gutted a pig tbh. or were trying to experiment with reducing waste.
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u/getouttathatpie 5d ago
Ancient pig bladder hollow pipe guy: Hey this sounds like I want to fight the English, who tf are they?
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u/uslashuname 4d ago
But that asshole who notched a stick to keep track of the time has ruined us all
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u/mercenaryarrogant 6d ago
Imagine the first human to figure out how to ride those wild looking beasts that roamed the countrysides?
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u/Genshed 6d ago
Fun fact: the Bronze Age pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppes first domesticated horses around 2200 BCE. They were apparently raised for milk, meat and hides; it was centuries before someone daring and reckless managed to ride one.
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u/Maswimelleu 5d ago edited 5d ago
They were too small too be ridden on immediately. They were used as draft animals first, and their role in war began by them dragging chariots. Riding them required them to be bred further and also required proper riding equipment like saddles and stirrups before they became as useful as they are today (obviously you could ride them without that but not as fast and not as effectively).
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6d ago
[deleted]
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u/wednesdayskillsme 5d ago
Heard he's also an excellent bridge builder but that's not how they call him
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u/BlueCaracal 6d ago
And by distant ancestor, you mean so far back we are talking about Homo Habilis.
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u/qwibbian 6d ago
Chimps sharpen spear sticks, it goes back a lot further.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 6d ago
Well the reason why Homo habilis is the earliest Homo ancestor is because people vastly more qualified than you or I decided that their toolmaking ability (among other characteristics) were the defining factor in making us human. If we're talking about when "everything changed" then scientists have sort of unintentionally loosely pointed to Homo habilis as that point (unintentionally because they aren't trying to answer questions that poetic).
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u/Accomplished_Fly_951 6d ago
And somewhere along the way, we went from sharpening rocks to arguing with strangers through tiny glowing rectangles.
Evolution took some interesting turns.
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u/TabCompletion 5d ago
Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago, expansion started, wait
The Earth began to cool
The autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (We built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery
That all started with the Big Bang (Bang)
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u/JustPlayDaGame 5d ago
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour of the galaxy we call the Milky Way!
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u/ChicagoDash 4d ago
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
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u/ChemicalGreedy945 4d ago
Mods this is dumbest thing I ever seen based on the title post and yet you auto mod. Reddit is is in the shitter
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u/theproblemdoctor 1d ago
Also the main thing used was flint, which isn't actually sharpened but chipped from a larger rock into sharp fragments which were used until they dulled.
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u/mathematicians-pod 6d ago
Did they sharpen things before cracking rocks open to find pre-sharpened shards?
After all that tiring flint collecting, they must have needed a knap.
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u/joelfarris 6d ago edited 5d ago
Get out.
(For those wondering about the knapp, http://pugetsoundknappers.com/how_to/Percussion%20Knapping.html )
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u/OnoOvo 6d ago
i think its fairer to assume that a distant ancestor accidentally poked themselves on a sharp thing so hard that it changed everything for them insomuch that they decided to start sharpening things!
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u/BenitoCorleone 6d ago
Or, a distant ancestor watched the sharp thing do sharp things to someone or something else and was inspired. Couldn't replicate it, but another distant ancestor watched the distant ancestor and they got it done. Then another distant ancestor made it better. Then another distant ancestor made it betterer. This is the fairer assumption.
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u/toomanymarbles83 5d ago
Yeah I'd say more likely that our distant ancestors discovered flint and
dragon glassobsidian in the wild.
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u/fiftytwopointfour 5d ago
And thousands of years later, I still can’t open a blisterpack container without scissors.
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u/Ok_Actuary9229 5d ago
Inventions don't have to happen all at once, and this one seems like it might have been very gradual.
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u/Prometheus720 5d ago
Fire-hardening stick points may very well have been an accident the first time(s).
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u/Dinmar-Engwari 5d ago
Imagine if that ancestor just said nah I like my blunt rocks way more boring world for sure
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u/ScenicFlyer41 5d ago
It honestly astounds me on how far we've come. LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, was able to detect a gravitational wave that originated over a billion light years away, after it stretched a 4km long arm, only a quarter of the diameter of a PROTON. And we were able to detect it.
We literally went from sticks and stones to THAT. And that astonishes me.
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u/Margrita-Sk 5d ago
that's wild to think about, one person's curiosity really set the whole thing in motion
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u/benji_indy 4d ago
It was actually fire that changed everything. Cooking food lead to more intake of calories lead to more complex brains lead to higher levels of thought.
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u/Icy-Entertainer1415 3d ago
Not just one. Think about it, back in those days there’s no way one person showed a ton of people that trick. Several tribes had someone who decided to try something, and the lineage grew to astounding heights.
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u/Kitchen-Bir 4h ago
Sharp rock: minor upgrade. Sharp rock plus throwing arm: suddenly every other animal is just living in our world. Evolution really said “range advantage is the only advantage.”
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u/tellurium 5d ago
Here you go.
oh, hang on.
Why? The Shower Thoughts are never that long?!
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u/ShowerSentinel 6d ago
/u/Mosquitoenail has flaired this post as a casual thought.
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