The last five million years cover the line of evolution from the primitive apes to the genus Australopithecuss (“southern monkeys”), then reaching our kind, fagot (about 2 million years ago), and finally in our species, Homo sapienswhich appeared 300,000 to 200,000 years ago.[1] According to our ancestors (H. habilis, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis) mostly adopted bipedal walking and started using/making stone tools, brain volume tripled, from 400 – 500 cm³ with maximum values ​​of 1100-1500 cm³. (Fig. 1).

About 60-70,000 years ago Homo sapiens began its territorial expansion, migrating from its original habitat of the African savannah to colder oceanic regions. Around the same time, Homo sapiens suddenly began to produce symbolic artifacts (such as paintings, statues, and accessories) along with a greater variety of tools.

Based on archaeological research, we can trace the migrations of our species out of Africa and its activities. Except for the cave art episode, which was largely confined to Europe (France, Spain) and a little further into Asia, there wasn’t much intellectual stuff going on nearly 10,000 years ago. On the other hand, modern genetics has clearly shown that our genetic code is, broadly speaking, very similar to that of our ancestors in Africa about 70,000 years ago.

Thus, brain size and behavioral complexity correlate only up to a certain point in time. Inconsistency in the appearance of the species Homo sapiens and a much later manifestation of his cognitive powers is known as A clever paradoxthe name was proposed by Professor Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University in 1996.[2]

The paradox is formulated in the form of questions like:

If genetically and physically modern humans have existed for the past, say, 100,000 years, with the same cognitive abilities that allow us to build airplanes, trains, rockets, and other sophisticated technologies today, why did it take them roughly 90,000 years to build something like civilization, as in Gebekli-Tepe? In other words, why was there such a gap between the emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans like us and the development of complex behavior? Why have humans remained “stuck in the plane” of cognitive evolution for tens of thousands of years?

Since its creation in 1996 A clever paradox caused an avalanche of answers and counter-questions.

Some researchers have tried to refute this by referring to the existence of slow but continuous human evolution. But these recent evolutionary changes are related to the diversification of food, and it is quite likely that our peers 100,000 years ago did not have as many cases of obesity as we do today. But the central point of A clever paradox refers to his cognitive evolution H. sapiens. Researchers who have studied this question (eg, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Peter J. Richerson, Yuval Noah Harari, David Graeber, David Wengrow) agree that cognitive abilities did not appear until 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Harari, for example, in the bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity, describes the existence of a cognitive revolutionscarried out in the period 70,000 – 30,000 BC, and has three main directions of intellectual development Sapiens: flexible language, reports about others (gossip) and collective fictions (myths, legends, gods, religions). In addition, it should be noted that trans Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago they had brains as big as ours![3]

A recent explanation A clever paradoxdrawing on elements from cognitive science, archaeology, anthropology, and neurobiology, proposes an alternative mechanism for accelerating cognitive evolution: the mutual interaction of neural, cognitive, and ecological niches in a positive feedback loop.²

Also recently, Professor Eric Hoel (Tufts University) took the idea of ​​”communication about others” from Harari’s book and published the essay “The Gossip Trap” (Gossip trap). Hoel suggests that the “castle in history” for many tens of thousands of years was connected with the so-called Dunbar’s numbera linear relationship between the size of the cortex relative to the rest of the brain and the average size of the social group to which the individual belongs.[4] According to this number, a man can maintain stable social relations with 150 people. Such a relatively small number would not allow significant social interaction, exchange of information, knowledge, experience, etc. Only occasionally, at a certain time of the year, did the density of human interactions seem to increase radically, thus producing amazing bursts of cultural expression. In conclusion, cracking Dunbar’s number would be an important step towards civilization. why Because, according to a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt,

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Hoel then explains:

The Gossip Trap works when your entire world is below Dunbar’s number, and in order to organize your society, you are forced to talk mostly about people [adică să bârfești]…And yes, gossip can act as an alignment mechanism… So we aligned with the earth for 90,000 years. Living in the gossip trap means that reputation management creates a slope so steep that you can’t get off it, hindering the development of something interesting, like art or culture, new ideas or new developments or whatever.

I would like to add a clarification here: the same Robin Dunbar, whose “magic” number supposedly controlled the scale of primitive social relations, published a book in 1998, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, in which he views gossip as a tool of order and social cohesion—like to the infinite care with which our primate relatives attend to their social relationships. Furthermore, Dunbar suggests that humans have developed language to serve the same purpose, but much more efficiently. There seems to be nothing wasted in the chatter or gossip that unites a diverse and dynamic group – be it hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or colleagues.

A clever paradox and climate change

An alternative explanation for the “stuck in history,” the “cognitive silence” of tens of thousands of years can and should include climatic factors whose variations eventually led to the invention of agriculture and the beginning of modern civilization.

While humans were hunter-gatherers, constantly migrating in groups controlled by Dunbar’s numbers, it is difficult to imagine how the various political and cultural experiments that arose only after the invention and practice of agriculture in the Upper Neolithic could have taken place.

The previous interglacial, called the Eemian, is similar in many ways to the present one, and took place between 130,000 and 115,000 BC. After which, with the melting of the glaciers approx. 11,500 years ago, the current interglacial period – the Holocene epoch – began.

First question: if H. sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago, why didn’t he invent agriculture in the Eemian? It was an interglacial period, like now, temperatures were 1°-2°C higher than now, and in the Arctic they were 2°-4°C higher than today (without the Paris Agreement), and the concentration of CO₂ was 0.028%, as in the pre-industrial period.

The answers to this question are speculative due to the lack of data on the population of that time, their activities and traces (artifacts) of these activities. There is no archaeological evidence of any technology that people living in the Eemian could have used for agricultural purposes (such as intensive harvesting of plants). It is quite likely that the animal world was rich and there was no need to domesticate animals. Let’s remember that at that time there was no adequate language and vocabulary for discussing new concepts such as the seed falls to the ground and you must wait until it becomes a fruit tree or some other edible plant. The idea that seeds DO exist would be an important cultural discovery whose time has not yet come.

Agriculture was impossible during the last ice age (115,000 – 11,500 BC). The climate was changeable and very dry over large areas. CO levels in the atmosphere₂ (0.015%) were low, in favor of vegetation. Perhaps most importantly, the climate during the last glaciation was characterized by large-amplitude frequency fluctuations on time scales ranging from decades or less to millennia. Because agricultural livelihoods are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and because the cognitive evolution of livelihoods using intensive and specialized plants is relatively slow, agriculture cannot evolve.[5]

After the glacial maximum 21,000 years ago, the process of climate warming began, glaciers retreated, groups of hunter-gatherers roamed new territories, it seemed that everything was going to a more pronounced warming. But the climate has changed again. Against the background of general warming, an episode of global cooling was triggered, when the world again returned to the “ice house” (glacier). The episode is called the Younger Dryas and took place between 13,000 and 11,700 BC. (Fig. 2). Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro