Science journalist and author James Nestor explains how you can breathe better. Then, learn about the secret identity of Bitcoin creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” and whether farming really was a step up for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Science journalist and author James Nestor explains how you can breathe better. Then, learn about the secret identity of Bitcoin creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” and whether farming really was a step up for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Additional resources for James Nestor:
No One Knows the Identity of Bitcoin's Creator by Cody Gough
Was farming really a step up for our hunter-gatherer ancestors? by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/was-farming-really-a-step-up-for-hunter-gatherers
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, science journalist James Nestor is back to help you learn how you can breathe better. Then, you’ll learn about why it’s a big deal that nobody knows who invented Bitcoin; and why the development of farming may not have been a step up for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Yesterday, James Nestor told us why we were breathing all wrong. But don't worry. He's back today to tell us how we can breathe better. James Nestor is a science journalist and author of the book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art," and he says that better breathing starts with something surprisingly simple.
[CLIP 3:10]
Again, that was James Nestor, a science journalist and author of the book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art." You can find a link to pick it up in the show notes.
You’ve heard of Bitcoin, right? It’s a digital currency that was created in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It's exchanged electronically, it's not tied to banks, and no central authority controls it. But you may not know this next part: no one actually knows the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s even though Nakamoto is estimated to own 5 percent of the total supply of Bitcoin. That’s a lot of money — and a dangerous amount of power.
Nakamoto has communicated electronically from a profile with the nonprofit P2P foundation. And there, Nakamoto claimed to be a Japanese man born on April 5, 1975. But searches for that identity don’t return many results. And anyway, the birthdate is fishy because of the dates involved: April 5 was the date President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order forbidding the hoarding of gold by U.S. citizens (in 1933), and 1975 was the year gold ownership once again became legal for U.S. citizens. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
One clue arose when Swiss coder Stefan Thomas graphed the time stamps from more than 500 posts Nakamoto had written in a bitcoin forum. Thomas identified virtually no posts between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which suggested that the lull happened when Nakamoto was asleep. The English in the posts was perfect too, so Nakamoto must be American, right? Maybe, except comments in the bitcoin code used British spelling. Red herrings or cultural giveaways?
Some claim Nakamoto must be a group of people based on the different technology disciplines behind bitcoin. One individual who’s been suggested as a likely candidate is Nick Szabo, who created a bitcoin predecessor called "bit gold" — but he denied that he is, in fact, Nakamoto. So did a Japanese American man from California named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, who has a similar name and birthdate, and experience as a system engineer in financial information services. And before you even ask, Elon Musk has also denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.
Okay, so why do people care so much who invented it? Well, like I said earlier, Nakamoto owns roughly 5 percent of the entire supply of the cryptocurrency, or roughly 1 million bitcoin. Multiply bitcoin’s current price by one million, and Nakamoto could be a very, VERY rich person… or people. Then again, a massive sell-off could trigger a ripple effect that crashes the value because of the increase in supply. It’s hard to predict exactly what would happen, but it definitely would be… something. Perhaps fortunately, for now, the creator of the world's first decentralized digital currency remains a mystery — and it’s kind of poetic, don’t you think?
In the timeline of human history, our transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers is considered a major step up. But did hunter-gatherers really have it so bad? The fact is that in some ways, they had it better.
The transition I’m talking about took a long time to happen. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and it wasn’t until about 188,000 years into our existence that we began to change. Instead of following our food, we planted it into the ground. This was a major technological revolution.
It’s easy to think that the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more agrarian ones led to an improvement in the overall quality of life. That’s been the common theme for thousands of years. Even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story known to exist, the Mesopotamians seemed to consider the hunter-gatherers outside of their settlements as sub-human.
But there’s growing evidence that in some ways, foraging humans might have actually been better off before settling down. For starters, they likely worked fewer hours per week than their agricultural counterparts, leading some anthropologists to dub them “the original affluent society.” It’s possible they were healthier, too. They had more varied diets than the farmers and weren’t tied to a single food source, so they were more resilient when it came to bad weather and other disasters. A grim 2011 study found that the skeletons in agricultural burial sites include a greater percentage of people between the ages of 5 and 19 years old than the burial sites of their hunter-gatherer counterparts do. When you look at it that way, agriculture seems like it made life harder, not easier.
So if farming came at such a high cost, why did we become farmers? It might have come down to numbers.
While farming may have been a more demanding lifestyle, it created a surplus food supply for the first time in human history. This led to skyrocketing population growth. If the farming population is growing at four times the rate of the foraging population, the farmers will eventually win on numbers alone.
Also, planting food in the ground meant settling down, which meant humans were living in larger populations than before. This led to the development of written language, organized religions, economies, and diverse, non-farming jobs to support it all. These were all things that were never necessary for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. You win some, you lose some!
Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Cody Gough (that’s me), and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!