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1:20:07I thought that was really cool. >> That was that was fantastic. Time vaults storing. Oh my my brain every week. I know for those of you who watch and listen, my brain's constantly being my mind is constantly being blown, but like the the implications of some stuff we talk about is just insane. We're going to go to our last main story of the day, which is going to be about ancient mathematics. Ancient maths. Yeah. as they say, uh, over over the across the pond, which right now we're having some sibling rivalry with. This story is in the journal of world prehistory. Uh, the dawn of art and mathematics, ancient Mesopotamian pottery reveals early
1:20:50mathematical thinking. >> Yes. >> So, we've been thinking about math, the maths for quite a while. >> For quite a while. And it it used to be that we thought math from the 4th millennium BC, right? The Sumerian city states, they had these like tablets that had stuff like the Pythagorean theorem. They even had the quadratic formula like figured out which I think is very very cool, right? And they had a base 60 which we still use today when we talk about like uh minutes to an hour, seconds to a minute, um angles, [snorts] things like that. We still use B 60. This is a new discovery that says that Halifian pottery, which is 6,000 BC.
1:21:32>> It's in northern Mesopotamia. This might contain geometric sequences and the first evidence of humans doing math. This is a,000 to 2,000 years before the Sumerian city states. Okay? And it's a pretty cool study and we're going to get into it. I have some I don't know much about anthropology and so maybe I'm >> maybe I'm not getting it >> but I think it's still a really cool study and I we'll get into some of the qualms that I have later on but it's not much. Okay, so this time period is 6th millennium BC, late Neolithic revolution right? >> The Halifians were this culture that were widely dispersed in a network in northern Iraq and Syria. So this is
1:22:12above the Euphrates and the Tigress rivers. >> Sixth century, sixth millennium BC, way back. Okay, so this is right when we're coming out of the post ice age stabilization. And the climate is becoming sort of stabilized and the world world population is about 40 million. It's quadrupling. It's like growing really fast. Humans are, you know, getting better. They used to live in these distinctive circular tolloy dwellings, mud brick dwellings, agricultural villages. They used to have dry farming, so no irrigation as of yet. They were just relying on the rains to make wheat and barley. They used to have hering for sheeps and goats and before
1:22:54the halafians the most of the art was dominated by animals. Okay, this is an example of cave paintings from 40,000 years ago from Lascal France. [laughter] I believe that's how they pronounce it over there. That's how it's spelled anyways. So I don't know any better. But 40,000 years ago, they were making a bunch of cave paintings that were a bunch of really beautiful animals and things like that, right? Halapian pottery comes in 6,000 BC. Very beautiful. First of all, the pottery itself is like really, really nice. Okay. And this pottery contains a shift between just focusing
1:23:34on animals to now also focusing on the botanical world. >> Okay. >> Okay. So if you go to the next slide, there's examples of plants on pottery, plant art. And this is a really fundamental cognitive shift from this hunter gatherer, animal- centered view to now farmers and plant-c centered, >> the vegetarians, man. >> Yeah. I mean because farming be becomes the way of life, right? To create civilization% >> to create population. So the idea with this paper is maybe this change is what's creating now mathematics and the need for mathematics >> because you're shifting into this system
1:24:16that naturally benefits from some foundational mathematics >> mathematics right because now you have like communal stuff >> that you need to split up. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. So let's get into the history of human mathematical thought right. um paleolithic. There was this thing called the Ishango bone which was discovered in the Congo in 1960. This is it's thought that the first example of mathematics. Now it's in a Belgian museum because of course the Belgians >> yeah the Belgians did great things for the Congo, right? And um for for those who are listening, my my face is very sarcastic. [laughter] Okay. The Belgians were probably the worst colonizers of
1:24:56all the colonizers. So, but they got the bone and now it's in one of their museums. Great. So, why do we think this is a mathematical tool? Well, it's got all these like notches on it that happen