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Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn’t available.
Still, if you’re a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy’s laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)
That’s not to say that some of these cities weren’t huge though. Rome had ~750K at it’s peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html
Huge for that time, sure… But we’ve had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.
True, but a lot of cities that we think of as big are around those numbers. They couldn’t get much bigger because of infrastructure.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states
Seattle is about 800k https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/washington/seattle
This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That’s nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.
Actually, this math is almost exactly how the young earth creationist cult came to their number for the age of the earth. The counted out all the begats in the Bible from Adam to Jesus and multiplied by an average amount of time between births.
Exactly. The fact that our kids can look different from us at all is fucking wild
That’s mostly gene mixing though.
If you had your child alone (a clone), they would look quite exactly like you. It would take several generations to see a change.
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn’t intelligence. It’s the knowledge we’ve inherited. Education is humanity’s greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I’m grateful to those who lifted us up, and I’ll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It’s society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I absolutely agree with that.
Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don’t mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there’s a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.
As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I’m pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.
I don’t think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.
The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.
The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.
The wheel isn’t some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It’s probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it’s also useless unless you have roads.
I’m always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.
The guy on the primitive technology channel smelled iron from orange bacteria. He used 3 different methods with his most complex tools being stone and clay. Copper and tin are generally easier, and are exposed on the surface in many areas. The only thing stopping people from figuring out bronze earlier was location and luck. I think the bronze age starting 7000 years earlier would have had an impact.
I know how to make black powder, and generally know how to source it. Between that and bronze, you could have guns over 11000 years earlier than we did.
I’ve built houses.
I know the basics of making paper. Even if I didn’t, clay tablets are easy. Writing 4000 years earlier would necessarily advance knowledge if nothing else happened. Throw in some math and the concept of zero and you could advance knowledge in those areas by thousands of years. Math isn’t relevant? Some of the oldest structures we have around use math and astronomy. Imagine if we had those 5000 years earlier.
One of the bigger reasons people don’t learn more languages is because they don’t have the time or interest. One of the best ways to learn is immersion. Being in a situation where you have to learn a new language if you want to communicate with anyone else would certainly be a motivator to put in the effort.
The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that’s from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I’m not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don’t have a forge.
Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that’s common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I’d be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.
I’ve seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.
I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.
But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d be banned or worse.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
For everything you need a willing society bcs one individual can’t do it all - it’s either you dig/build one well & others feed you or you do the efforts communally. Same with metalwork, that’s a whole specialisation in the most basic sense (you need a workforce & resources for them to gather ore, work it, and forge anything of useful size - metalwork to produce a few grammes of metal per year isn’t worth it, so you need a city-sized community at your disposal, and you need to get to that point … unless maybe as an expensive way to just pass the knowledge for later gens to put it to good use, which might be successful, unless forgotten or the community doesn’t survive).
Animal domestication can take generations too in some cases (bovids), you need to first focus on docile females, and once they stay in a designated area (either like a valley or even fenced fields), you need the resources (food) to keep them alive there. So you need to build up agriculture at scale first. That why we found the first real domestication evidence around ancient cities, not random villages.
Yeah, if I was going to jump start domestication, I’d start with chickens or sheep/goats. Chicken and goats can eat just about anything, so can be fed scraps and quickly become a net positive. They’re also smaller and easier to manage than cows. Goats can be troublesome, but their risk is limited by their size.
Domestication on both those species started about 10000 years ago, so it would only speed things up by 2000 years.
Smart, but you would need to be in specific area to get chickens (south Asia?) & goats (middle East?) suitable for domestication, which would still take several human generations to achieve - so in your lifetime you would just pass the knowledge (in case someone was interested) but otherwise live your life without seeing the results.
It’s not like livestock domestication didn’t start about asap after there were conditions for it (cities, stable food production, some bureaucracy/specialisation/trade, etc)etc.
If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)
Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn’t have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves
If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn’t an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don’t understand and don’t exist. You can’t do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn’t have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.
You just start with math, there’s plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-“invent”. After that people would start taking you more seriously
Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn’t want to go that route
Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don’t have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That’s stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.
Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
I’m trying to make the distinction between the ability to just ‘make’ as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn’t make sense bcs you don’t end up with enough use-cases.
(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).
I do agree with that!
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!
Pre-modern first-birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.
You’re assuming that your matrilineal line is entirely composed of firstborns.
I’m not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren’t necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa (Niger in particular has an average of 7 births per woman) meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.
Average reported marriage age of women in Niger is 19… I’ve lived there, and in the village, it’s 15 or 16. I have seen 9 year olds get “married” but it was really more like a reservation to get real married when she’s 15 or so. Even using official stats, 1 kid before 20 and 3 or 4 kids before age 25 is very achievable.
I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers there who didn’t think anything of it. They’re 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.
I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.
And the meme is being conservative
Anything but metrics…
The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago
I came here to say “obviously American, anything but metrics…”, but you bet me to it.
Ehm … Metric … Time?
I may be an ignorant American, but can you explain metric time to me? What is the SI unit of time? Days? I’ll meet you in 4 decidays, 3 centidays, and 20 millidays.
USians are so insulated that they don’t know the rest of the world has 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes each.
Half a cup of seconds
If of one person today every previous generation ancestral parents only consists of unique pairs then go back 80 generations that’s 280 of people had to exist during that 80th generation back. That’s more than 1.2 septillion so a one with 24 zeros. So that’s impossible that’s more people than have existed in history. Meaning that inbreeding has happened in everyone’s family tree. So lots of distant cousin marriages. But unfortunately also some fucked up shit like some of your ancestor’s parents are brother and sister or father and daughter. So if you follow your paternal line back the number of dads is less than the number of mothers.
You’ve made the assumption that everyone has a unique pair of parents. You’ve not taken into account that parents can have multiple children.
One of the reasons behind the population boom (but not the only reason by any means) is that infant mortality is so low nowadays. Not that long ago, you could have entire families wiped out by diseases that are now functionally eradicated or easily treatable.
If you assume two children per group of parents survive until adulthood, the population line stays stable. It’s because of the massive rise in the number of children reaching adulthood that the population spikes so suddenly.
No that’s not the assumption I made. I said if one living person today had unique parents all the way back. Why would I have to take into account siblings if I’m only looking at the direct lineage.
I also said it’s impossible and inbreeding and pedigree collapse occurred.
The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there’s a good chance it’s lower than that too.
Doesn’t change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.
Tbf, it was also far more common for people to have a shitload of kids, which takes time and thus would mean the mother was a fair bit older for the youngest few. My grandma was the youngest of 12 and her mother was well into her 40s when she was born.
Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.
I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.
I’m not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn’t mean they got married at exactly this age – it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.
This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it’s far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.
You’re joking though. Right? Or are you thinking about wealthy people? The ones who might be written about?
I come from several generations of “prom night” conceptions and “shot gun weddings”.
Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.
Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.
Yeah, when we’re talking about a 12000 year span and your references don’t go past the last thousand, it isn’t very representative. Relevant, certainly, but do you think that had much bearing in ancient Egypt? And that only gets us halfway through the time span we’re talking about.
uhm, actually the age of marriage basically exclusively depended on the real circumstances. in the roman empire, it was much lower, because rome was eternally at war, which consumed a whole lot of soldiers. that would not have been possible if women hadn’t had a lot of children, for which you’d have to start early.
the christian religion increased the minimum marriage age from 12 (!!) to 15 in the 3rd century CE (late roman empire), because rome stopped being a war-based country and there was simply no need for that many soldiers anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age
also the same link explains that the average age of first childbirth was significantly lower for american settlers than for european peasants in the early modern age; again the reasoning is that the american settlers were a highly expansive population (roughly a doubling of population every 20 years!! in the time period 1650 - 1880).
I’m sorry, but I am also a source.
Anecdotal data isn’t
It is. But only as data point(s), not as a trend or generalization.
You can’t just look at the age of the mother when she has her first daughter. You also have to consider her age at the time of her last daughter. Even if she has her “prom night” daughter at 18, if she later has another daughter at 36, we’re looking at an average age of 27.
see my other reply below
Lots of babies and children died before adulthood though, so its actually not a bad bet for 25 as an average birthing age for one that survives to adulthood. Not that every woman would lose her first 2 kids or whatever but enough certainly did to drive the average up somewhat from what it would be with modern medicine.
Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology… is always just 2-3 generations from poof
i think it’s also worth noting that a whole lot of children basically died due to malnutrition … think about it. contraception was not existent, so if a woman gets pregnant 8 times, but the family can only feed 2 children, that effectively means that 6 would essentially starve (or die due to other “preventable” diseases, but actually the better prevention than modern medicine is just food, since enough food strengthenes the immune system).
even if you had modern medicine at the time, children would still starve; the thing that really drives down child mortality is just a lower birth-rate altogether, since the family can still feed 2 children, regardless of whether they actually make 2 or 8 babies.
Yeah. As society becomes more complex, maturity and preparedness comes much later. “Growing up” takes much longer.
Go back a thousand years, things were much simpler. There was less to navigate and learn so “the real world” started much earlier.
Look at any other creature without society and see how their life unfolds. They’re “adult” very quickly because within a short time they’ve got enough figured out to go out into the world alone.
Meanwhile, we’re now at a point where it’s normal to have a first child in the 30s and 40s, feeling completely unready.
i looked that up a while ago and apparently the median age of first childbirth was around 21 or 22 for women, though this depends on wealth: wealthy people had children earlier (on average), going down to about 16-18 for many noble women.
poor people often didn’t have children at all.
According to this scale, Aboriginal Australian cultures are 2,600 mothers old.
That’s a lot, but also not. I know my grandmother and know of her mother but beyond that no idea who they were beyond where they were from.
We assume my ancestors are all from the same place (Alligator rivers) but going back that far it just seems so slim we’re not from elsewhere too
I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a “score” being 20 for that reason.
Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.
I think about this, and do this math in my head too, all the time. 80 mothers to Ancient Rome. 400 mothers to start of farming.
I pointed out that the people in those photos screaming at Ruby Bridges are still alive and vote like mad and my brother was flabbergasted.
My grandmother passed away in 2015, but when she was born in 1922, there were Civil War veterans and people who had been owned as slaves still walking around. She was 43 when the Civil Rights Act passed
Haha reminds me of that other stat how you only need to strip/peel a some graphite on a piece of tape like 20 times to reach a single atom thickness (graphene).
By this math, humans have only been around for about 80,000 mothers.
Gives perspective on how accelerated change has become in modern times.
