If life began in the ocean, why didn't civilization?

I'd like to think that on some horrible alien planet there's been an underwater agricultural revolution

Eh, coral reefs would be nice

WE

It's hard to start fires underwater.

Underwater volcanic vents

Because electroncis would get all wet

real answer: oxygen availability.

It's far more easy and efficient to extract oxygen from air rather than water. It's no coincidence that that animals that evolved on land and then returned the water (e.g., whales and dolphins) are some of the best swimmers and largest creatures in the ocean. Air-based breathing allows you to process much more energy using aerobic metabolism and thus lead to much more complex and successful organisms.

>dolphin screeches
>you think it's cool
>he's actually telling you the glorious history of its people, using, at best 4 words, from a vocabulary that is so complex that every termn contains in itself hundreds of human concepts

If you think you can forge metal next to a vent you need to see a neurologist asap.

Is metal a requirement for civilization?
Come to think of it, is fire?

Have you ever tried starting a fire under water? It's fucking hard.

Depending on what definition you are using yes.

Allthough the most common definition is having a written language IIRC.

> He doesn't know about complex whales society and its internal clan politics.
Can't blame you for that. Human brains just aren't complex enough to understand a whale thoughts.

You have my attention.
Citation?

>what is Atlantis

Girlfriend wrote her marine science phd on how fucked dolphins are, they may be smart but all they do is rape each other play and eat fish.

> nature.com/articles/ncomms9091
It is pretty known that whales have pretty complex society compared to many animals and their brain actually has more neurones than ours. Who really knows how deep that all goes.

I'm pretty sure op is pointing out the faulty logic of claims like "If humanity began in Africa, why didn't civilization?"

> rape each other play and eat fish
Basically pre-historical raping and hunting stage of culture.

Actually, I was asking it genuinely.

You could still cook.
Maybe you could later develop cloth venture into welding territory.

Morals are useless in the ocean.

wow

...

>Grilfriend
Fuck off, normie

I know, right?
Why can't he stick his dick in the twitching, bleeding flesh wounds of a beaten sea otter like the rest of us?

Return from whence you came you /pol/ack jigaboo

I've sometimes thought about if it would even be possible for a civilization that was born in the sea to have an industrial revolution, and if so what it would look like.

Romantic Era Britain meets The Lonely Mountain.

As a sidenote this doesn't mean that they don't posess some makings of a civilization.

From what I've learned they and whales have rudimentary nomadic hunting culture with learning communicated down through generations but it seems that they haven't made any notable progress past creating a culture with very basic oral history. I think this is just because they don't need to and can't as they can't manipulate their environment extensively.

If you wanna look up an example have a look at the tribe of dolphins that has returned to an Italian village for thousands of years annualy to herd fish into the river mouth so humans and dolphins can catch fish more effectively close to breeding time

no
A G R I C U L T U R E
G
R
I
C
U
L
T
U
R
E

That's not Ancap

> what is kelp
> what is coral
> what are the things that eat these things

Really? that would exclude most Africa peoples.

There are several writing systems used in africa

They didnt invent them from scratch butt then neither did europe

Fpbp

How the fuck is this a Veeky Forums and not Veeky Forums question.

Maybe cos sea animals don't have a developed Neocortex. (of course I'm talking shite, just a wild speculation). What definition are we using for Civilization here?

There are ancient writing systems in africa, I know, but it's only a few select peoples that have it. Many, if not most, african peoples don't have writing.

& humanities

Do you think dolphins will have civilization one day? They're intelligent af and know how to cooperate. Like, give em a million years to keep evolving, and maybe they'll be able to build things on the seafloor.

intelligence does you no good underwater. big fish will pretty much just eat small fish and there isn't even an effective limit on how big things can get like on land.

plus no fire and almost no possibility of tool use.

Never heard of Atlantis?

Never gonna happen.

Dolphins have only one feature more important than their massive intelligence: their streamlined bodies. Their bodies are what allows them to move through the water quickly and capture fish to eat, without their bodies being nearly perfectly shaped to minimize drag, they couldn't move fast enough to catch their food and move to areas they need to follow the capricious food patterns of the ocean.

In order to build things, and use tools effectively, you need complex limbs, at least more complex than a flipper. This would ruin their streamlined bodies, and they would starve.

Dolphins will never be able to use tools like primates or even birds, who have the benefit of their claws, and not just their beaks.

In order for dolphins to become civilized (at least the way we humans perceive civilization) they have to give up the one advantage they can't.

Dolphins are evolutionary deadlocked unless they evolve psychic or telekinetic powers.

/thread

underrated answer

... yep.

Watch some Primitive Technology videos on Youtube.

Fire is used as a external energy source for all sorts of work by early man.

Tree log too long and your stone tools not effective enough to cut it? just start a fire where you want to cut the log.

use controlled fire and chipping away with a rock to carve out wood.

make ceramics

cooking food is like having a second stomach. giving you more calories from the food and allowing you to run a big energy hungry brain.

They do have a civilization. It's more like a tribal hunter-gather one, but it's there. Whales, dolphins, and some octopus are pretty much on par with your average person as far as intelligence goes.
I would suppose the biggest reasons why they haven't produced anything like us is their lack of limbs/appendages to utilize in making and using tools. The other big reason, I suppose, would be the environment. There's nothing to build on. Oceans currents and sand produce a structurally unsteady environment, and the water pressure makes anything beyond a 100 meters impossible to use without advanced metallurgy.

Sorry user vertebrates are limited to what they can be in the water and that is a streamlined finned faggot.

Meanwhile mollusc can have tentacles that can be used to manipulate objects in the case of octopus. Arthopods are the only marine creatures that actually have solid limbs and thus can develop grasping parts to manipulate matter.

Though genetically altering dolphins to have prehensile tentacles then observing them constructing shit would truely give us any idea of their intelligence.

It is under the sea. Dolphins have no use for gold.

A more closely related one then

If English came from German why did English people have the largest empire in history

Because variables

Then explain Cambrian super monsters

Did they intentionally grow it nigger

Maybe octopi can do it?

I remember on NPR they had a story about this lady that lived with a dolphin and tried to teach it how to talk. Then the story kind of went off the rails when she mentioned she used to jack the dolphin off regularly to get him to pay attention.

>Then the story kind of went off the rails when she mentioned she used to jack the dolphin off regularly to get him to pay attention.
kek.
classic NPR

>Dolphins have a civilization of the mind.

Dolphins fell for the smart but lazy meme?

If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on them, if I had to pick an aquatic species to evolve into a civilized society.

Their main disadvantage (apart from living exculsively in the ocean) is that they are not social animals, and live solitary lives. This makes complex social behavior which is necessary for civilization impossible.

Unless a species of social octopus is discovered, just as smart as Pacific Octopus, don't hold your breath.

Eh, people let pre-history threads by all the time.
Better than another "blacks are stupid lol" thread.

the sea ones were large for their days but still tiny compared to today's aquatic animals
also they were as slow as they were stupid so their bodies didn't need that much oxygen

>Better than another: better than another blacks are stupid lol

Do you intentionally act retarded or do you watch CNN
Inb4 it's the current year, everyone is equal

Minorities are antithetical to a complex society by European standards. They will be cleansed

> Minorities are antithetical to a complex society
That is why minorities peacefully assimilated according to standards, silly user.

I'd honestly consider it more likely for a species of dolphins to evolve proper manipulators than for smart, social octopi to arise

If something stupid I believe, why is reality different?

O yes, look at our blessed blacks and Muslims. Everyone is equal because I say so

Some proof there shitstain

No you need a skeleton to live on land, octopi are slow moving moving flesh on land, and unlike gastropods they have no shells to hide away.

Suction cups are also shit on land as well.

Muslims created European civilisation there is nothing bad with their race.

No, because they weren't that intelligent.

The barrier to underwater civilization is not something that prevents intelligent life from civilizing, it is something that prevents intelligent life in the first place.

I.E. no ability to cook, and less available oxygen.

>Muslims had a golden age
>They are perfect

From a western point of view we acknowledge what helped us and whether it's minor or not so long as it's largest it gets coverage.
The Muslim golden age of two hundred years wasn't as large of a benefit as the biggest ten golden ages for Europeans. If you're talking about helping globally then it's not as good as the top euro 50 best golden ages

Your arguments are shit tier and reek of regurgitated high school history class

I disagree.

The evolutionary gap between dolphins gaining another set of limbs or else their fins becoming manipulators and losing their streamlinedness is much greater than any mental social change needed for octopi to start becoming social.

No immediate benefit for dolphins to gain manipulating limbs, whereas the benefits of social behavior are always present.

Many believe that the foundation of complex social behavior lies in the maternal instincts, which Octopi already have, the mothers just die of starvation before their children are born.

Granted the mollusc brain is very unusual, and I don't know if it has all the necessary components the mammalian vertebrate brain does.

So idk what would actually happen in a billion years, but I just think a civilization of octopus would be more interesting.

That's my point. They weren't intelligent. That's why there existed no agriculture.
Whoever brought up kelp and seaweed made a half ass argument

>treat blacks as subhumans for centuries
>actively prevent them from assimilating
>complain that they haven't assimilated yet
really makes me think

At least Muslims weren't slaving owning exploiters of poor native peoples. In fact, it's west nations are the one to blame for current Middle West problem.

>actively prevent them
Only the Bantu idiots in West were enslaved by whites, during that time millions of morons in Central and South Africa were free to make all the civilizations they wanted but didnt do shit.

Lol o they weren't. There should be an IQ test to post on these boards

theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migration

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade

I really hate minorities

another massive disadvantage octopi have, compared to humans, is that tool usage is not nearly as big an advantage to them as it is to us

Humans, (and hominids as a whole), are superbly adapted to tool usage in all its forms, not just dexterity, which is something an octopus could potentially match, but also in terms of strength.
Humans are capable of exerting a very large amount of force with incredible precision, its not unheard of for a human punch to inflict major trauma even to a large predator if he connects it properly. Tools allow a human to amplify this natural ability greatly, a fantastic example of a primitive tool that does this is the spear.

While an octopus could reasonably fashion a spear, and even hold it, he would completely lack the ability of a human to make the strong and accurate jabbing motion that's required to kill larger animals. Add onto this the fact the octopus is underwater and as a result throwing objects isn't near as effective, the fact the octopus has to deal with attacks from full 3 dimensions (humans have never had to deal with predation from birds) and the fact even the largest octopi are still vastly smaller than their largest predators (as opposed to humans which are actually fairly close to even the largest land predators overall) means that proper tool usage would not, as it did for humans, ensure their status as an apex predator.

And all that gets even further compounded by the complete lack of fire.

That's because you're mentally ill.

Biggest slavers on the planet, not slavers.

kek

Veeky Forums is a non minority site. Quit leeching. Meme culture is ours, English and the internet is ours. You will grovel at our feet before you speak against us

>Muslims created European civilization
kek.
How could muslims create the Greek city-states and Roman Empire hundreds of years before Muhammad was born?

>Muslim
>Golden
>Age

almost a funnier meme than >Holy >Roman >Empire.
All of their """accomplishments""" were stolen from India like algebra and the concept of zero.
Their wealth was only generated by existing along trade lanes between Europe and Asia.
Their main value was the preservation of otherwise almost lost literary works of the Greeks and Romans, which helped inspire Renaissance.

In other words, the Muslim Golden Age is a hilarious misnomer that doesn't reflect history at all. More like Hordes of Tribal Peoples Serve as Intermediaries between Antiquity Europe/Eastern technologies and luxuries and Recently Recovered Europe

o rlly?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade

>oh shit he pointed out a flaw in my argument!
>better change the subject
fuck off m8

I'd say river dolphins could reasonably evolve a form of manipulator that serves as an increase in fitness rather than a decrease

either way though, I don't see any marine animal getting a proper society similar to that of humans, if we were to vanish our successors would, as boring as it might be, likely consist of some form of ape
if instead all apes were to vanish well then maybe we'd get something more exotic out of the corvids (which already fit the required intelligence, social nature and tool use)

fair points all of them

kek, fuck off.

> Their wealth was only generated by existing along trade lanes between Europe and Asia.
This is like all wealth are generated, by trade.

I posted it was minor but it was beneficial. It's just Europeans knew what to do with it

give me a source now

Cetaceans will have to go back on land if they want any civilizations, you could probably do that by isolating some in a freshwater area then slowly making it dry in process of a thousand of years forcing them to remutate their fins into flippers like otters and eventually become land limbs entirely.

moron.
they didn't produce anything.
they just taxed the lanes of traffic, passing through their lanes.

other wealth generated through trade is created by producing something of value in exchange for something else of value.

Muslims of the 11th - 14th century AD gained their wealth by fortunate positioning, and rentseeking.

Just like their modern wealth is derived not by their ingenuity, but by luck of owning land with massive quantities of easily accessible oil under it.

and the Europeans had a lot of luck their lands contained vast resources of easily accessible coal kickstarting the industrial revolution

The point was they simply benefitted from our societys existence