Did you know cavemen were already dealing with “Big Data” issues?
We know Big Data & Analytics are new & cutting edge technologies; but actually, human started using data & analytics techniques 5000 years ago. Let’s take a look.
Nowadays everyone is talking about data & analytics. Executives are figuring out how to turn it into value, researchers are writing huge numbers of papers about it and students are enrolling in massive numbers in data science programs.
This would lead to believe that data and analytics area recent phenomenon. Indeed, there are convincing reasons that show analytics is more important and relevant than ever. However, the underlying idea of analytics – the urge to understand the nature of our reality and to act accordingly – is as old as humanity itself.
What’s even more surprising is that people seem to have solved an enormous big data problem several millennia ago. To see how, let us summarize a chapter from Yuval Noah Harari’s great book ‘A Brief History of Humankind’.
For millennia our ancestors have been living as foragers hunting for animals and looking for sweet berries. At this point in history data was already crucial. If you always forgot that snakes are dangerous and red mushrooms are poisonous your chances of survival were slim. Luckily, the amount of important data was small so people could store everything they needed to know in their brains. However, when humans started living in bigger settlements and communities the limits of our brainpower became painfully obvious.
Living in these larger societies required an entirely different mental skillset. Many problems that arose were data related and could not be solved with the conventional technique of the day: memorization. For example, local rulers had to know how much grain they had in their inventories and whether it was enough to survive the winter. There were taxes to be collected from thousands of inhabitants and thus payment data that had to be stored. There were legal systems that had to handle property data and ever growing families that had to keep track of their family tree.
