If man has been around for a million years?

Question

if modern man has been around 1 million years, why did it take us so long to show our intelligence? it seems like the records show that man only started building things as little as 10,000 years ago. this is a fraction of the time we have been here...how is this possible?

Answer 1

Modern Man has been around about 100,000 years.  And all modern humans were as intelligent as today's modern humans.  But intelligence and knowledge are not the same thing.  Until about 10,000 years ago, Humans did just fine with no written language and very little technology.  But with more and more humans, in denser and denser populations the 'need' to manage and plan, rather then live day to day emerged.  Knowledge needed to be shared and passed on.  

To illustrate the point - 100 years ago Thomas Edison was at least as intelligent as Steve Jobs is today.  So why then did Edison invent that tiny, scratchy, fragile, bulky, hand cranked phonograph instead of an iPod?   Of course everyone understands that technology had to evolve from Edison's time to current time before the iPod was possible.  So why is it so hard to conceive that smart humans 10,000 years ago could build buildings but smart humans 50,000 years ago couldn't?

Answer 2

What I heard (I'm not going to site anything, look it up it's there) that us humans were taught technological knowledge taught by aliens. We never ,as humans before our time, had any knowledge of what we have today.  The ancient egyptians were taught these things. These aliens taught us astronomy, mathematics, medicine/science and everything else related.

Answer 3

We're not nearly as advanced as we think we are.  Human children raised by animals or left alone without interaction don't develop speech skills, invent wheels, or often even use tools.  It's the combined effects of a million years of development we see in each other; without having been raised that way, we don't just start building computers on our own.  

http://www.feralchildren.com

Answer 4

Don't quibble the years.  Pick a number between 100,000 years and 2,000,000 years and you can find reputable scientists to agree with you.  The most obvious reason is that few artifacts can survive that long without degrading beyond recognition.  Man uses his intelligence for survival: improve crop yields by farming, outsmarting his predators, and outsmarting his prey.  Man uses it for figuring out how things work (science), and then how to make practical use of that knowledge (engineering).  It all takes time.  It takes a way of recording knowledge so each generation doesn't need to start all over again.  The more intelligence is used, the more the capability grows.

Some of the parallel footprints have been shown to be frauds.  I don't know whether any credible examples have been found, or how much intelligence you can attribute to a footprint.

Answer 5

Events happen that wipe out a lot of life.

Then it has to start over.

Then it takes time for information to spread. Say a cave man in Africa learned that a pointed stick killed better than a  fist---the cave man in North America would not know about it.

Answer 6

What Kev H said!

Answer 7

dude, we havent been here 1million years......moron.....we been here 10k years or less

Answer 8

We were always intelligent, but we didn't always have the knowledge base to build off of we do now.  Today we take things like simple structures and simple agriculture for granted as something that 'all smart beings should know' but that's only because it's part of our current knowledge base and we've been raised in a world where we're constantly exposed to that.  If you were a primitive human, not only would you not have someone to teach you how to farm or build, you would never have considered that it was even *possible* to farm or build because no one had ever done it before.

There have never been any human footprints found along dinosaur footprints.  A million years instead of a hundred thousand still does not even come close to putting dinosaurs and humans together.  Dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago.  All of the claims have either been misinterpreted dinosaur tracks, or straight out hoaxes.  I was actually at the Paluxy river (where the claimed human footprints next to dinosaur footprints were found) less than a week ago looking at them for myself.  There are some tracks there that come from hoof-footed dinosaurs that, if you don't know what you're looking at, you might think were human tracks.

There is lots of information on the Paluxy tracks here - http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy.h...

Summary: "the "man track" claims have not stood up to close scientific scrutiny, and have been abandoned even by most creationists. The supposed human tracks have involved a variety of phenomena, including forms of elongate (metatarsal) dinosaur tracks, erosional features, indistinct markings of uncertain origin, and some doctored and carved specimens (most of the latter on loose blocks of rock)."

Answer 9

Stacking stones on top of each other ? Depends on what you mean my building.

Answer 10

Cro-Magnon man was the first of mans ancestors that could be called H. Sapien, they lived 45,000 to 10,000 years ago and before Cro-Magnon man you had H. Neanderthalensis or neanderthal man who comes from a different branch of the evolutionary tree, Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthal Man lived side by side with each other and competed for the same resources. The reason that mankind wasn't as intelligent back then as we are now is because our brains had to evolve as our bodies were evolving.

Holy frig Yahoo's censorship has messed up my links.

Answer 11

1 million years.  Your saying that dinosaur's are man.

Answer 12

It takes tools to build the tools necessary to build the tools for the construction you are asking to see. Plunk modern man down in the savannah without his tools and see how long it would take a small tribe to build stone houses. Before those houses, our presence is shown by simpler artifacts and by skeletal (mostly) remains.

The "human" footprints along with dinosaur footprints can be explained in two ways. Human feet are fairly primitive and some dinosaurs had feet that left somewhat similar prints, especially if you have only a partial print to go on. The other explanation -- well, while I hesitate to call people liars, some of those "prints" showed chisel marks. But then, again, there are the "Bigfoot" remains in Georgia, the Cardiff Giant, Piltdown "Man", enough pieces of the "True Cross" to build a house ...

Answer 13

modern humans haven't been around that long. but anyway, i'm thinking modern humans didn't have pressing need to make buildings until the advent of mass agriculuture: why build a building if you're nomadic whereas if you have a farm you're definately going to want to settle down near your farm to protect it.

Answer 14

Hey, it even took God a while to create things!! ;0)

Answer 15

humans have been around for 100,000 years approximately, and the first humans think of inventing things at first and mainly focused on survival.

Answer 16

If you plotted a graph with the x axis technical progression and the y axis time I think you'd see a definite curve rising steeply in the last few decades. So maybe the more technology you have the easier it is to create more technology and so on, so back when we first began we had no technology so it was very slow going until we began to amass a collection of technical ability and knowledge. Also there was less of us to invent stuff, most of us would have been busy surviving.

I hope that made sense, that's just my theory.