Posted on 04/21/2006 11:14:50 AM PDT by blam
Because it represents a sudden increase in cognitive output over a relatively short period of time that dramatically increased the fitness of AMH relative to existing Homo species.
LOL
Exactly my point!
Contemporaneous with the second migration out of Africa (that displaced or merged with, depending on who you believe, existing hominin populations), Homo sapiens began using new and far more complex tool technologies 40-50,000 years ago, began using art and burying their dead, began building living structures, and were living in larger and more complex societies. It was a radical transformation that took place in a fairly short period of time and completely changed the way hominins lived and behaved.
We had to work through issues resulting from billions of years of repressed memories...horrifying memories...I really can't go there right now.
So what caused this sudden burst of cognitive output?
Why? You're confusing cognitive and morphological evolution.
Yes, it would be amazing and we should have colonies in space by now... if we had really been around for a million years.
Maybe, if anatomically modern humans had been around for one million years, but we haven't been. I also think you more than slightly discount the costs associated with the earliest paleolothic tool technologies -- the jump from no tools to the simplest stone tools to more complicated, designed stone tools represents a much greater cognitive shift than the jump from chariots to corvettes.
I'm not sure there was a "cause," per se, but evidently a population stumbled on a winning formula that made them and their descendents much more fit than other hominin populations. Think of it as analogous to the discovery of iron, 3000 years ago: populations that had iron in a very short time were able to overrun every population in Eurasia that didn't have iron.
Another part of it is a population question -- these more advanced hunter/gather societies were able to support far larger populations that essentialy swamped what had been there before.
There is documented, gradual evolution in tool technologies leading up to this explosion, but if you're asking what the key turning point was, I don't know.
But why did it take so long?
When exactly were there "no tools"?
Now that you put it that way...dinner forks are really overrated.
Paranthrapoids had tools as far back as 2.4mya, but as this article shows, there's no evidence H. erectus/ergaster used tools until 1.5mya.
"We had to work through issues resulting from billions of years of repressed memories...horrifying memories...I really can't go there right now."
That's a keeper.
> But it wasn't until 50,000 years ago or so that we really had the explosion in technology, art, etc. that allowed humans to take over the world. What's amazing isn't that that explosion didn't happen earlier, but that it happened at all.
Three cheers for the Toba supervolcano and the near-extinction of the early humans as a result! Those who survived had to be the smarter and cleverer ones. Once the "jocks" got weeded out, the early "nerds" were able to lead humanity on it's road to the stars.
First, you boil the rocks
Nope, archeologists will claim it is public history, so not only will you not be rich, but they will take via Imminent (Yes I, not E) Domain and you get nothing.
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