What did Homo sapiens do for the first 190,000 years?

Question

I would really appreciate some SERIOUS answers to this question, especially from evolutionists.  I was doing some thinking lately about how modern day man supposedly evolved 200,000 years ago.  Then I realized that most of things we know about man are much younger than the race itself.  I did some research only to discover that the oldest know civilization is less than 10,000 years old.  The oldest writing is less than 6,000 years old.  Language itself is only 100,000 years old?  Did Homo sapiens grunt to each other for the FIRST 100,000 years?  The oldest stone tools are 400,000 years old, twice as old as Homo sapiens?  Another web site told me that stone tools were 2.5 million years old.  Were they made by apes (sorry, “common ancestor”)?  If so, why can’t all apes, monkeys and simians make stone tools?   The oldest art work is in a cave in France that only dates back 32,000 years.  Do you mean to tell me it took humans 168,000 years to figure out they could paint on a wall, when most children can figure this out by age five?  Transportation like wheeled carts and boats are still only 8,000 years old.  Do you mean to tell me that it took intelligent humans 192,000 years to figure out the concept of boats and wheels?  Finally, the compass, the mechanical clock, the glass lens, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented in the last 1000 years.  I find it very hard to believe that Homo sapiens would not be able to pull themselves away from hunting and gathering long enough to contribute something more than stone tools for the first 190,000 years of existence especially when modern man went from the first powered flight in 1903 to walking on the moon 66 years later.  Below are references to my research in case there is any question that I am making this up.  I seriously want to know why the earliest humans contributed almost nothing to modern society.  If evolution is correct and Homo sapiens are in fact 200,000 years old, what did they do for the first 190,000 years?

Oldest Civilization
Iran has about 8000 years of history. Iran is the oldest civilization in the world.
The Neolithic Revolution is believed to have occurred somewhere in southwest Asia around 8000 BC.
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/38638
Oldest Written Form
Some people base their answer on which language got written down first. If you're counting absolute oldest, probably Sumerian or Egyptian wins because they developed a writing system first (both start appearing in about 3200 BC). If you're counting surviving languages, Chinese is often cited (first written in 1500 BC), but Greek is a possible tie because it was written in Linear B beginning ca. 1500 BC.
http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/oldest.html
The oldest language was created about 100,000 BC it's name has never been defined as we are unsure which of the living languages are its decendant. 
http://hubpages.com/hub/Worlds_oldest_language
Oldest Tools
Archaeologist Ali Mahforuzi said on Wednesday that 400,000-year-old stone tools discovered in the valleys of Shuresh near the Rostam Kola, Huto, and Kamarband caves are the oldest ever found in the area.
http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=192883
Most researchers agree that the first humans to make tools lived in Africa. Very simple implements have been recovered there that are about 2.5 million years old. About a million years later, the more sophisticated teardrop-shaped tools began to emerge.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/664967.stm
The Chauvet Cave, Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave
“The first began to appear nearly 200,000 years ago in association with technologies not unlike those of the early Neandertals.” 
http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm
A fishing boat, presumed to be 8000 years old, has been dug out of the ground at Changnyeong County in South Gyeongsang Province… is the oldest of its kind ever discovered in the world.
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200509/200509060002.html
it is still a mystery as to who invented the wheel and when the wheel was invented. According to archaeologists, it was probably invented in around 8,000 B.C. in Asia. The oldest wheel known however, was discovered in Mesopotamia and probably dates back to 3,500 B.C.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C004203/science/science02.htm
The compass, the mechanical clock, the glass lens, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented in the last 1000 years.
http://encarta.msn.com/sidebar_461576120/Landmark_Inventions_of_the_Millennium.html

tehabwa · Accepted Answer

First, before I forget and because they're still on the copy/paste clipboard:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibits/index.php

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/evolution

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/human-evolution/dn9990


That last is the most directly relevant to your question. (the newscientists links have links to some free stuff and some "subscriber only" stuff, unfortunately; but there's probably enough freebie stuff to help you).

First, we don't know everything, right? There were no cameras recording people's lives. We've been trying to piece the story together from really limited evidence.

Suppose you had never, in your whole life, seen or heard of a wheel. They're actually kinda complicated -- you need an axel and attach that to the "vehicle" in order for it to be useful; it's not as simple as "round things roll" is it?).

ould YOU have been able to come up with a functioning, useful wheel?

We don't really know when the first modern-type language arose. It's most likely that it came from earlier, simpler, proto-languages, which, if you go back far enough, would derive from the sorts of language our cousins have.

Chimps don't "just grunt" but have a variety of sounds they make.

Tools, huh? Chimps, BTW make tools, there may be some that use stone tools. Making a stone tool is a complicated line of thought, the notion of a tool for making a tool. That is, you have to use other things to make a stone tool (another stone), in order to do the thing the stone tool is for.

So part of it might be lacking the ability to reason with that many steps until fairly recently.

Also, there's no reason to make a tool unless there's something you need or want to do that requires the tool. So one's mode of life would have a big effect on when you start developing what kinds of tools.

(This is what I love most about this site! I've never thought through all this in just this way before. Having FUN, now! Sorry; back to your regularly-scheduled answer.)

About painting on the wall. WHY? Why do this? What I'm saying is that it's not that people wanted to and couldn't figure out how, but that the whole notion of a symbol for a real thing, and the desire to depict it was a recent development.

Our brains aren't an undifferentiated, general-use thing. We have specific areas that do very specific tasks. Representing things, and interpreting symbols are among those specific tasks. Before we had those "modules" the whole notion wouldn't come up.

Although I love the web and find it really informative, you might consider also reading some books. A book can go into the kind of detail you seek.

The story of how we came to be what we are now is being figured out as we speak, so newer books will be better. See if you can find some that specifically address the pre-human to human story.

BTW, we did descend from apes; we ARE apes ourselves.

About clocks. First, there was no need for people to tell time to the minute. You get up when it gets light. Do your thing. Then it's night.

They didn't do things like have doctor's appointments at 2:15.

The first need for clocks was religious. The monks needed to know exact times to do their prayers -- and the ones during the dark hours were especially tricky.

This last thing I learned from a really interesting book I recently read that I think you'd like:

The Explorers. It's a history of knowledge.

I also wanted to point out two more things. Our population was relatively tiny until really recently. We now have more people directly engaged, as full-time jobs, science and technology development than their used to be people alive at a given time in the far past.

Given that 1) living takes a LOT of time when you can't get things from stores; and 2) not everyone has an aptitude for invention, it's not as surprising to me that things took so long. Also, we now have access to the work of everyone else; before we had access to people near us, and a bit of advantage of trade.

Also, a given invention usually depends on other things already having been invented before.

You don't go from a working wheeled thing to a car in one step.

You're also denigrating the development that DID occur before the last group of things you list. Agriculture and domestication of animals. Over time, many refinements to both and expansions and improvements to both.

Building: homes, other buildings, and other large things.

Writing, art, working with metal. Clothing (from very simple to really, really complex).

Well, I hope this helped.

Possibly the single mistake we make when looking at the past is looking at it in OUR terms. What's obvious to someone living now wasn't obvious at all to someone living 4,000 years ago. You need to try to put yourself in their shoes. How much would YOU have invented had you lived, say, 50,000 years ago, in the culture of the time?

targetbutt · Answer

Think about it this way, from the year that Moses supposedly walked out of Egypt, how long did it take for men to go from using swords to using guns?  Technology doesn't develop in a linear fashion.  Once things get going to goes fast, but to get it going there were a lot of resistance to change.  The technology change in the past 100 years of history reflects this.  From as far back as the time of Moses, people rode around on horses, until the 1900's then all of a sudden we have planes and rocket ships.

Necessity is the mother of all invention.  When people need nothing they are content.  This is what happened for the first 190,000 years of existance.  These early Homo Sapiens lived in small groups, they are content with how they live, and thinks that nothing should change.  Much like the small tribes in the Amazon that they had just found.  These people still live in the stone ages today.  They also had no time to sit around mulling what they can do to make things better.  They have to work all the time just to survive.  Sitting around and thinking is a luxury they can't afford.

Add to that the influence of religion, and the resistance for change becomes much greater.

Johnny V · Answer

Yeah, what a bunch of slackers those early homo sapiens were!

Single cell bacteria have been around for about 3.5 billion years. (Estimated 20 million to 800 million species now..)
Multicellular organisms showed up about 600 million years ago. Took almost 3 billion years to evolve from single cell to multicellular..
Mammals showed up about 200 million years ago. Early primates about 60 million years ago.
Our branch of the hominids started roughly 6 million years ago.
The language thing probably took millions of years to develop from grunts and snorts to Shakespeare.
About 3.5 billion years from bacteria to Shakespeare.
In spite of the fact that about 95% of all the species that have ever existed are extinct.

"What did Homo sapiens do for the first 190,000 years?"  Just trying to stay alive.
And we might not even be around 100 years from now.

Heart of man · Answer

We don't know because wood rots.

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What did Homo sapiens do for the first 190,000 years?

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