Chapter 2: What Were They Thinking?
Origins of Government, from the Paleolithic to Philadelphia
Page 53: Origins of the State of Nature: the Cognitive Revolution. Language, Narrative, and Culture.
Map of archaic human species in Africa and Eurasia, showing how they did not reach into the Arabian peninsula or the frozen North, or cross water to any islands. (With a wolf in the tundra saying “Winter is here.”)
SIS (narrating): 5,000 generations ago, Homo sapiens was only the newest of many human species, which had already been evolving and adapting to the various environments of Africa and Eurasia for a couple million years.
All were brighter than our ape cousins — using fire, making stone tools, etc. But they were all archaic humans.
None had the brainpower to invent or learn new skills, adapt to frozen tundra, or even cross water, it seems.
Any new adaptations had to wait for the slow accidents of random genetic evolution over many thousands of generations.
This new Homo sapiens had much the same anatomy as modern humans, but they didn’t yet have the modern human mind.
That was about to change.
SIS (narrating): In the beginning was the word.
Sensation reaching eye.
SIS (narrating): Archaic Homo sapiens didn’t have words. Heck, they didn’t even think conscious thoughts like you and I do. They mainly felt intuitive perceptions.
Sensation is interpreted across brain regions.
SIS (narrating): Hardwired systems in the brain took in sensations, interpreted what they meant, and reacted accordingly.
Perception resulting in popping a strawberry in the mouth.
SIS (narrating): They probably didn’t even have memories of the past, which we take for granted. Life was experienced in the now.
Mini-comic begins.
SIS (narrating): But this new species had a few new genes, and new ways of expressing some of the standard-issue genes.
Just some happy little accidents of evolution.
One nifty novelty was the remarkable range of vocal sounds they could produce.
Children playing and making funny sounds.
SIS (narrating): It’s easy to imaging children playing with these sounds.
VARIOUS CHILDREN: Bzzrp! (Ha ha ha) Glatch! Fya-lino! Oke!
TREE KID: …Oke?
Tree Kid places hands on tree.
TREE KID: Oke Oke Oke Oke Oke
ANOTHER KID (Placing hand on the tree): Oke?
REST OF THE KIDS (Pointing at the tree): Oke! Oke! Oke! Oke! Oke!
That night, the children are asleep near the fire. Tree kid is visualizing the tree and whispers:
TREE KID: Oke
All the children go wide-eyed, as they all envision the same tree.
SIS (narrating): Words are magic.
(Section break)
SIS (narrating): Instead of instinctive hoots and howls, with preset meanings and responses, this new species could create new vocalizations, could associate them with any perception, and so share that perception with every brain in earshot. For a social animal whose survival depended on working together, this modest mutation delivered a huge advantage.
People gathering fruit from a tree.
FRUIT FOLK 1: Cooperation is so much easier, now that we’re all on the same page.
FRUIT FOLK 2: What’s a page?
Stick figure with microphone, saying “Hello?”, with stack of amplifiers turning it into a screeching “OOOOOOOO” so loud the Earth itself has to cover its ears.
SIS (narrating): They still couldn’t think like us, or even have a simple conversation — but these magic words started us on our way.
Any tweaks that aided social communication swept through the gene pool, all of them amplifying each other in a feedback loop of accelerated evolution.
Woman and man making tools with rocks.
SIS (narrating): Wiring for syntax, for example, made it possible to combine (and understand) strings of words conveying much greater detail, nuance, and precision.
ROCK WOMAN: No, not that rock. Hand me the darker, egg-shaped one.
…To your left…
…Your other left…
No…
SIS (narrating): It follows that putting the right words in the right order meant a capacity for logical, sequential thought…
ROCK MAN: Okay, but if you want a rock that won’t shatter the first time you use it, you’ll want this rock.
Couple pondering.
SIS (narrating): …and that required a substantial working-memory “buffer” where words could last long enough to be assembled into sentences.
PONDERING GUY: I need to pre-say sentences in my head, to make sure they’ll make sense to the others.
PONDERING GIRL: Hold that thought…
Prehistoric youth holding an old-timey radio microphone, peering out like a sports announcer.
SIS (narrating): And so a new brain process evolved, which could take in the unconscious perceptions and make sense of them — with words and syntax — so that we could share them and be understood.
It was a full-time narrator in our heads, giving a running commentary explaining our experiences with stories that seemed to make sense.
ANNOUNCER: So it looks like what’s happening now is…
New brains.
SIS (narrating): This mental spin doctor was to become the world’s first CONSCIOUS MIND
Not the simple consciousness of an animal brain that’s merely awake and aware…
…This was the new consciousness of a human mind that was actively thinking!
BRAIN HAVING AN EPIPHANY: Holy shit!
Brain with an amplifier feedback knob.
SIS (narrating): We’d gotten that far rapidly enough, but once the human brain started telling stories, our cognitive revolution kicked into overdrive!
BRAIN: Now it goes to eleven!
Girl daydreaming while others look on.
SIS (narrating): For example, by playing around with stories, we could think about what might happen.
In other words, we had imagination!
ONLOOKER 1: Check out Karen— daydreaming again.
ONLOOKER 2: Whoa… Testing options in a simulator in her head? With no risk of death or embarrassment if they wouldn’t work?
You bet I’m checking her out! She’s got genes with a future.
The fruit gatherers are back at the tree, but there’s no more fruit.
SIS (narrating): And once we could imagine the future, what was to stop us from imagining the past?
By telling itself stories about its experiences, the brain invented another uniquely human ability — episodic memory!
FRUIT FOLK 1: Hey, what happened to all the yellow fruit that grew here?
FRUIT FOLK 2: Yellow? Are you crazy? They were red. I remember distinctly.
FRUIT FOLK 3: Oh yeah, red. I remember now.
Aside box.
AUTHOR: [Readers of the Crim Pro comic may recall (ha) that episodic memory is not a recording of what actualy happened. It’s a story our brains piece together from whatever information happens to be available, and seems to make sense.
Our brains rewrite and edit each story every time we recall the pieces it’s made from.
In other words, memory is not about what is accurate…
it’s about what feels true.]
Couple lounging on a riverbank.
SIS (narrating): Okay, so… All these thoughts and memories and dreams and ideas and plans? We weren’t just telling these stories to ourselves.
The whole point of all this brainpower was social communication. And boy did we get good at it. With story and syntax and increasingly precise language, we were sharing our thoughts with each other.
MENTAL MAN: Magic words are one thing, but sending out thoughts into other people’s minds?
MENTAL MAID: That sounds like telepathy to me!
SIS (narrating): Which is another way of saying cooperation may be our survival skill, but story is our SUPERPOWER!
Guys hunting a bear.
SIS (narrating): With this new superpower of narrative, our newly-thinking species could act as one.
We could plan strategies together by sharing (and debating) everyone’s experiences and observations and ideas.
HUNTER 1: Bob, you go behind those trees and distract the bear, then we’ll spear it from behind.
HUNTER 2: That’s not exactly sporting, is it?
HUNTER 3: Yeah, at least give Bob a chance of surviving!
Bear chasing the guys.
SIS (narrating): With everyone knowing the plan, and knowing what everyone else was doing, we could cooperate like crazy. And as circumstances changed, we could alter our strategies on the fly.
HUNTER 1: Okay, Plan “B” — Bob, you play dead, and spear it in the belly when it stops to investigate.
BOB: No. Plan “B” is “Run faster than you guys.”
People mocking Neanderthals.
SIS (narrating): Up until now, no human species could do more than ape what they saw others do. But our narrative mind could invent and teach and learn new technologies and skills.
MOCKER 1: Those archaic guys have been making the exact same tools, the exact same way, for a hundred thousand years! …Longer!
MOCKER 2: Ha! Monkey see, monkey do!
MOCKER 3: Ugh, you guys are so species-ist.
Smoldering but enthusiastic guys crashed on the ground, one’s hair is on fire.
SIS (narrating): Bonus: Learning by doing requires an opportunity, and can seem risky. But now we could rehearse skills and learn from our mistakes in the safe virtual reality of imagination.
[EDIT SUGGESTION: Change “an opportunity, and can seem risky” to “the opportunity to do it, and real-life mistakes have real-life consequences.”]
EXPERIMENTER: Aha! I know what we did wrong. Next time, we need to…
Group listening to a storyteller on a grassy slope.
SIS (narrating): As with apes and grooming, archaic humans likely could only bond one-on-one, and only one at a time. But with speech we could bond by sharing our thoughts with everyone in earshot.
GIRL IN AUDIENCE: See? We share everything!
Cocktail party diagram.
SIS (narrating): We share best with three other people at a time (more becomes an audience rather than a conversation). Each of you can tell three more, and so on, spreading socially useful gossip throughout the group in one evening.
And thus the cocktail party was invented!
CHATTING VOICES: Hey, did you hear?
Do tell!
Gab Hey! Chat Hey! Dish Chat Share
SIS (narrating): Gossip is important for cooperation. It’s how we know who’s trustworthy, who’ll work with whom, who cheats, etc.
Gossiping group
SIS (narrating): Big brains are expensive, evolutionarily speaking, but ours just grew bigger and bigger — mostly so we could gossip about more and more people, and cooperate in larger and larger groups.
GOSSIP GIRL 1: Check out the big brain on Brett!
GOSSIP GIRL 2: Aw, he’s just keeping up with the Joneses.
GOSSIP GUY 1: Keeping up on the Joneses, you mean!
GOSSIP GUY 2: So Rolf only gave Evie a hug, but Evie didn’t want to make Sharon jealous, so Rolf went over and kissed Sharon in front of everybody, and Fred was like “You and Rolf? Seriously?” And Angie was all “Oh Fred! You’re into Sharon?” and she ran off crying! But the best bit was when Fred ran after her going “No that’s not what I meant” and Nick & Nicki got up in his face saying “If you make our little sister cry… when out of nowhere EVIE-
[EDIT SUGGESTION: Needs a closed quote after “sister cry…”]
Perplexed woman.
SIS (narrating): As it’s just as important to know how much everyone else wants to cooperate with you, this storytelling mind started telling itself very self-conscious stories — of what others must think of you.
PERPLEXED WOMAN: Is this the right thing to do?
No, I’d better not say that.
I keep having horrible thoughts! I must be a horrible person!
What will the neighbors think?
Jiminy crickets but it’s hard having a conscience!
The mental couple on the riverbank again.
SIS (narrating): With brain bits structured to observe ourselves, to judge ourselves, in real time… suddenly, we were self-aware!
MENTAL MAN: I’m aware of my own thoughts!
I’m… aware of myself being aware of being aware of myself!
MENTAL MAID: Is that why you’re always talking about yourself?
Groups of emotional people.
SIS (narrating): Along with conscious stuff like language and self-awareness and imagination, we also broadened the scope and depth of our unconscious social emotions — feelings (and ways to read others’ feelings) that kept us all in line without having to think about it.
GROUP A: Yikes. That was a bit of a faux pas.
Ha!
So why are we laughing?
Oh man, I am so embarrassed.
GROUP B: You did what? You realize how bad that was? I’m outraged!
We know. We’re ashamed.
But we’re sorry!
We feel so guilty!
How can we make it better?
GROUP C: Oh honey, don’t cry!
There there, everything will be all right. You’ll see.
We’re here for you.
Now I’m sad for her.
GROUP D: [Some anti-social emotions, too]
I wish I had all the guys fawning over me once in a while.
Aw, get over yourself.
GROUP E (mammoth hunters): Great job everyone. We should all be proud of what we’ve accomplished.
We are!
It’s so satisfying when we all pitch in.
I tell ya, times like this, life feels good.
So that’s why you’re always grinning.
I thought it’s because he fell on his head that one time- ha!
Shut up, don’t ruin the moment.
GROUP F (solo): I was loyal to you
But you betrayed me.
It hurts! It hurts!
I’m going to make you hurt.
[Perversely pro-social?]
SIS (narrating): To understand all these new feelings, in all their shades and nuances, our mind of course created new narratives… like morality. Narratives which, in turn, helped us restrain our selfish urges and encourage cooperation — even self-sacrificing cooperation.
SIS: Hold that thought…
SIS (narrating): With all this intelligence and creativity and social narrative, we didn’t merely survive in climates and circumstances that would have killed archaic us — we thrived!
And thanks to narrative, what we created and learned during life wouldn’t die with us.
Instead of waiting ages for an accidentally successful gene to gradually spread itself among our descendants, successful narratives — memes — spread themselves throughout society immediately. And our children passed these memed skills and norms and ideas and symbols and behaviors on to their children…
Bonfire dance.
SIS (narrating): And so we added CULTURE
to our growing list of superpowers.
DANCERS: Life has meaning!
Music!
Beauty!
OLD AUDIENCE MEMBER: Phoo on this modern dance. Give me the classics any day.
PARENT (to child): It’s the story of when the moon fell in love!
SIS (narrating): Thanks to our new-and-improved biology, we had become the first animal with an existence separate from biology.
Stick figures.
STICK FIGURES: The only one, actually, so far as we can tell.
But if we’re wired to act this way, then isn’t our sense of transcending biology just an illusion? …another narrative?
If so, then do our lives really have meaning?
Great. Just great. Now you’ve gone an invented philosophy. Happy now?
Neanderthals reading the script.
SIS (narrating): Again, all of this happened in the blink of an evolutionary eye. In perhaps as few as a thousand generations, we’d transformed — from one of the non-sapient archaic species without language or culture or creativity…
NEANDERTHAL 1: “Ugh?”
You seriously want me to say ugh?
NEANDERTHAL 2: Frikkin’ species-ist author.
NEANDERTHAL 3: “Ooh, look at me. I have language. I’m so special!”
Montage of Mona Lisa, Pizza, Taj Mahal, symphony, calculus, smartphone showing a relatable webcomic, Voyager, F-22.
SIS (narrating): …into our modern human species, with the same intensely social brain that came up with calculus and Christianity… that gave us poetry and pizza… that painted the Mona Lisa… that pilots fighter jets, builds cities, composes symphonies, discovers the laws of physics, sends robots beyond the solar system, transmits comics across the Internet…
A brain hardwired for society through story.
Stick figures.
STICK FIGURES: So wait- are we still the same species as archaic Homo sapiens?
Homo sapiens? The “wise” man?
Don’t know about wise…
How about Homo narrans, the storyteller!
Proas in action.
SIS: *ahem*
And with that brain…
We took over the world.
JOE: Great, wonderful. Now we all know how we got to our state of nature.
Any chance of telling us how we got to 1787??
If you would like to learn more, here are just a few suggestions to get you started:
53. Language, Narrative, and Culture
Books:
Donald R. Wehrs, Suzanne Nalbantian, and Don M. Tucker, eds., Cultural Memory: From the Sciences to the Humanities, New York: Routledge, 2022.
Paul B. Armstrong, Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.
Matthew E. Brashears and Laura Aufderheide Brashears, “Compression Heuristics, Social Networks, and the Evolution of Human Intelligence,” in Michael S. Vitevitch, ed., Network Science in Cognitive Psychology, New York: Routledge, 2020.
Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
Articles:
Andrew E. Budson, Kenneth A. Richman, and Elizabeth A. Kensinger, “Consciousness as a Memory System,” Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, Vol. 35, No. 4 (December 2022): 263-297.
Vanessa A. D. Wilson, Klaus Zuberbühler, and Balthasar Bickel, “The Evolutionary Origins of Syntax: Event Cognition in Nonhuman Primates,” Science Advances, Vol. 8, No. 25 (June 2022): 1-12.
Armin W. Schulz and Sarah Robins, “Episodic Memory, Simulated Future Planning, and their Evolution,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. 14 (2023): 811-832.
Simon E. Fisher, “Human Genetics: The Evolving Story of FOXP2,” Current Biology, Vol. 29 (January 2021): R65-R67.
Joseph Henrich and Michael Muthukrishna, “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation,” Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 72 (2021): 207-240.
Francesco Ferretti and Ines Adornetti, “Persuasive Conversation as a New Form of Communication in Homo Sapiens,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 376 (2021): 1-9.
Paul J. Eslinger et al., “The Neuroscience of Social Feelings: Mechanisms of Adaptive Social Functioning,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Vol. 128 (September 2021): 592-620.
Katherine Nelson and Robyn Fivush, “The Development of Autobiographical Memory, Autobiographical Narratives, and Autobiographical Consciousness,” Psychological Reports, Vol. 123, No. 1 (January 2020): 71-96.
Dan P. McAdams, “‘First We Invented Stories, then They Changed Us’: The Evolution of Narrative Identity,” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-83.
Enrico Coen, “The Storytelling Arms Race: Origin of Human Intelligence and the Scientific Mind,” Heredity, Vol. 123 (2019): 67-78.
Feel free to offer more suggestions in the comments!
.
This was originally going to be a very brief page, but I was having so much fun with it, and it really does set the theme for a lot of what’s to come. Anyway, I did cut scads of fun stuff about social group size and structure, various takes on Dunbar numbers and brain size, specific genetic mutations beyond the FOXP2 you always read about, specific “wiring” in various bits of the brain for all these new developments like syntax in the left IFG/STG/MTG or emotional pre-emptive self-awareness in the pACC/r.DLPFC/SC-Pul-STS/etc or higher consciousness in probably the spindle-shaped Von Economo neurons (love that name) that make up about 56% of the AI and 58% of the pACC (and what about the claustrum?) and the high-speed connections that enable simulation, and how it all develops through childhood as pathways myelinize and etc, and theories on why we don’t have episodic memories from before learning to talk or perhaps even learning to read, and so many fun little throwaway asides and puns and digressions…
But I digress.
Lest you think this whole thing is a pointless digression, there is method to my madness. These final pages of this chapter will prove to be relevant (I hope), not only to what the Framers thought, but also to what we right here right now are thinking when we take sides on all the contentious issues of Constitutional Law.
Folks are going to disagree with my narrative here (lord, I hope they do), but if I do this right we can at least all start the next chapter on the same page!
words.gif
Seriously though, nice post.
Thanks!
[Insert wall of text here]
Are you sure that “archaic homo sapiens” didn’t have words, or even thoughts? It’s been a decade or two since my last bio anth class, but I feel fairly certain that several previous Homo species must have had at least some degree of ability with symbolic logic, etc. I’m also thinking of e.g. Koko the gorilla, who was able to form word-groupings, express novel ideas, and some degree of reasoning. It seems to me that while the ability to use complex vocalizations came quite late in our recent evolutionary history, it’s a reach to state factually that archaic homo sapiens were incapable of [i]thoughts[/i], when we’ve proven a gorilla is capable.
Am I sure? I mean, I wasn’t there. And as I kind of hinted here, reality is always going to be a lot messier than the narratives we tell about it.
Don’t read too much into what Koko did. Her trainer did plenty of that for us (much of what Koko was reported to have said appears instead to have been her trainer’s generous interpretation). Primates do have impressive communication skills, but so do bees, and communication is not language. Chimps and apes do have a touch of creativity that allows for strategic behavior — so do wolves — but they lack language. They cannot share their ideas with more than a few close family members who know them so well they can “read” their intentions intuitively. Humans, chimps, and orangutans are all adept at communicating by gesture, but humans blow the rest out of the water when it comes to explicit communication, rational thought, and social cognition. Apes also have a decent, rudimentary “theory of mind” as one would expect of a social animal, but they have nowhere near human levels of intentionality. Nor do they have anywhere near the same ability to understand what another person was trying to do, or what they were looking at, or otherwise fully comprehend that there is another similar “me” living inside that other head. We can make chimps behave like humans, passing on social information or seeming to communicate with symbols, but we do it naturally ourselves, when left to our own devices. All this tends to imply that other apes have an extremely limited ability to think the kinds of thoughts we think of as “thinking.” If at all.
You might have a stronger point if you stick to archaic human species. There is eyebrow-raising evidence implying that archaic species may have had symbolic practices. Neanderthals buried their dead, for example, which one might interpret as evidence of some sort of sanctity belief. On the other hand, burying your dead could have been a protective demonstration of respect for others. A behavior that, while extremely social, requires no symbolic abstraction or narrative beyond “we take care of our own.” And such behaviors are not unique to genus Homo. But on the other hand…
But Neanderthals and Denisovans and Heidelbergensis and even archaic Sapiens did not have the unique genetic traits that we evolved around 70,000 years ago (give or take). They lacked the radically new structures and abilities of our brain that make it possible for me to write this sentence and expect that you’ll understand it. I can tell you things like “I remember that the other end of the rabbit hole is behind the second tree on the left; if I smoke them out here, you can catch them over there.” The divisions may not be as cut-and-dried as my narrative, but no chimp, gorilla, or Neanderthal could say this, and there is little reason to suspect that they could think it.
“Neanderthals buried their dead, for example, which one might interpret as evidence of some sort of sanctity belief. On the other hand, burying your dead could have been a protective demonstration of respect for others”
It could also be purely practical, dead bodies start to smell bad and may well be a disease vector.
so, uh, Nathan you teach philosophy or anthropology where?
Heck, I don’t teach nothing nowhere. I’m a lawyer, which means I’m a perpetual student.
That’s one of the cool things about the law: It’s the study of what people say they do, what they really do, why they do it, how we can know it, and what can be done about it. It’s where history, philosophy, psychology, and economics meet. And in criminal law, at least, anthropology and neuroscience and genetics also have important forensic value. I’ve studied them all, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t love trying to keep up to date. And I’d be lying if I claimed expertise in any of them.
One of the really fun parts of this comic — for me, anyway — has always been trying to synthesize current scholarship as best I can, with silly pictures and in as few words as possible (no, really!) keeping in mind that so much is still a subject of active research, and new studies drop all the time that shake up what everyone thinks they know. And as I always say, my favorite comments are the ones that tell me I got something wrong, and point me in a new direction!
Great post. Interesting serendipity with a BBC program I was listening to this weekend; the program was called “The Hidden Brain”, and this weekend, it was a discussion on the evolution of religion; the researcher’s idea being that:
1. Humans can group together in <25 and do fine (if someone farts, everybody knows who did it, and everyone knows who is trustworthy and who is not).
2. You get over 50, and you need a virtue signal to say "John is good," so we invented religion to deal with the problems of the day… and you can see what the societal issues were based on the gods that were created in religion (and this is from my memory + my thinking, but the subject was fascinating):
a) Gods who had stories that you needed to ask about weather/crops/etc (Greek) – we need food.
b) Gods who are vengeful and have a moral code ingredient of being nice to others (Allah) – we're a society of traders and we need to know that we can trust our partners
c) Gods who have strict rules and traditions of doing things (Jehovah) – you didn't eat shrimp because they didn't have refrigerators and that stuff would kill you faster than "lamb" or "cow."
d) Gods that offer forgiveness for transgressions (Jesus) – "the man" was keeping you down a lot…
3. Because of this need for virtue signalling, all of the religions have a thing that is called for that is not in "your best interest" from a personal sense… it's a display of worthiness (much like a beautiful peacock tail is actually a detriment to the ability to fight, but it's a signal to others "I'm beyond fighting")… the Journey to Mecca, Fasting, Lent, etc.
Interesting/fascinating stuff.
—
As far as pre-verbal memories go, I still have some… but they're surreal SciFi images — images powerful enough to persist even though there were no words associated with them….
I really enjoy that show. But though points 1, 2, and 3 are CLOSE, they’re not quite on the button. Hold tight for more on all that, because it’s part of what’s coming up next!
My earliest true memories, like yours, are more image and emotional impression than sequential episodes. And I probably only remember them because I liked recalling them and telling myself their story after I’d learned to speak and read, giving meaning to the nameless impressions I’d formed. From the transition time when I learned to read, some of my most vivid memories are of newly-narrative dreams that affected me powerfully at the time. From what I’ve read (peppered strongly with my own confirmation bias and false consensus effect) this is probably a common human experience.
I think the overall story you’re telling here is reasonable, but it’s possible the timing was much more stretched out than you are claiming. There are certainly scientists who believe that archaic humans had language in the modern sense. One way or the other there does seem to have been some sort of cultural explosion 50,000 years or so ago, but rather than being a result of the de novo evolution of a whole new mental apparatus, as you seem to be arguing here, modern humans, with more or less the same kind of minds as archaics, may simply have reached some sort of tipping point, with some relatively small innovation (perhaps a modest increase in IQ) cascading into huge behavioral changes. The fact that Neanderthals and Denisovans both made small but significant genetic contributions to modern populations would seem to suggest that modern humans didn’t see them as animals, and could at least talk to them.
Also, I just want to point out that evolution did not stop 50,000 years ago, as many people believe. In fact, surprisingly, it seems to have been accelerating over the past 10,000 years, as human populations have increased (more people means more opportunities for positive mutations) and people moved from foraging to agricultural societies (resulting in evolutionary pressure to adapt to new and significantly different lifestyles). There is an excellent discussion of this in The 10,000 Year Explosion, by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending. (I tried make a link to Amazon for the book, but I don’t know if that will work here).
One person’s “timing was stretched out” is another person’s “blink of an evolutionary eye.” Researchers have gotten very good at estimating how long ago any given genetic mutation arose, and how fast it spread through the population. It’s a range, not a pinpoint. And it depends on what DNA you’re looking at. For example, Neanderthals were diverging from H. Heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago, if your calculations are based on mitochondrial DNA. But if you’re using nDNA it could have been as recent as 270,000 years ago. That’s a big range!
As for the beginnings of our own cognitive revolution, just a few years ago people were thinking it had happened much more recently, but archaeological evidence keeps pushing it towards the earlier part of the range.
As best as I can tell from the available evidence, we H. Sapiens had diverged as long as 300,00 years ago, and were successful enough to spread as far as Morocco and South Africa. By 170,000 years ago, we were wearing clothes (and lice had evolved to live in our clothes), and a precocious population in South Africa was using red ocher and behaving at least as artistically as Neanderthals. But as recently as 100,000 years ago, we were still very much archaic. Bands that drifted out of Africa into Sinai until then simply couldn’t adapt to the new environment, and were out-competed by the Neanderthals already there.
It looks to me as though the cognitive revolution was truly underway around 80,000 years ago. True art and ornament produced by a brain capable of symbolic behavior is being discovered in sites dated as early as 77,000 years ago. Toolmaking had gone from “monkey see monkey do” to creative refinement by 72,000 years ago. By 70,000 years ago, we’d advanced enough to start displacing Neanderthals when we wandered into Sinai. Music appears to have evolved right along with language (my favorite book on this is the outdated but incredibly insightful “Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy” by Robert Jourdain) and we were playing flutes in Germany by 42,000 years ago. At that same time, incredibly organized seafarers were crossing the oceans from Indonesia. Crossing to Australia meant crossing 100 kilometers of open sea. That’s not accidentally washing ashore. That’s intentional migration. These were people (with a significant dose of Denisovan DNA from interbreeding) who told stories of what they expected to find beyond the horizon, and how they could get there. They weren’t lone adventurers but families traveling to settle. This required incredible powers of imagination and comprehension, shared narrative, foresight, creativity, invention, tools, tools to make tools, sophisticated oceangoing vessel technology, genius navigation by reading the propagation of waves across the globe and stars across the celestial sphere, precise mature language to convey all these narratives, and massive cooperation with significant division of labor. 42,000 years ago!
And as you say, evolution is an ongoing thing. It wasn’t until around 37,000 years ago that the microencephalin mutation — the gene responsible for our enormous brain size — was dominant. But talk about “blink of an eye”! This was so successful that it spread essentially overnight, so far as our DNA is concerned. No genetic drift here, this was supercharged positive selection. (The Neanderthals go extinct around now, as well.)
Physical evolution was ongoing as well. People in Tibet adapted to cold high-altitude living while folks in sub-Saharan Africa continued to adapt to more tropical demands. By 30,000 years ago, convergent evolution had led to lighter skin in populations of Europe and East Asia, two different genetic adaptations to UV exposure by populations that had long since diverged.
And as will be mentioned in the next couple pages of the comic, further genetic mutations appear to coincide with massive punctuated changes in how human society has been organized. No spoilers, but things like the ADH1B mutation in southern China and the ASPM mutation in Eurasia (to name just two) coincide neatly with major revolutions in how we live.
I would caution, however, against concluding that we were able to speak with Neanderthals and Denisovans simply because we interbred with them. Archaic species don’t require words to have sex, and neither do humans. (Language can make it oh so much more enjoyable, but it’s not a prerequisite.) Archaic DNA isn’t found in the Y chromosome very much. That could indicate that Neanderthal males couldn’t produce viable offspring with Sapiens females. It could also indicate that choosy Sapiens females weren’t opting to mate with less-to-offer archaics, while male Sapiens were less discriminate in where they sowed their wild oats. The latter is plausible in any primate species, and the former certainly becomes more likely as the species diverged. If language had any role to play in the mixing of our species, I’d glibly propose it was the LACK of Neanderthals’ ability to whisper sweet nothings that played a role, rather than their having such an ability.
OK, you’ve obviously been paying at least as much attention to the literature as I have! :-)
I’d like to follow up though about your assertion that microencephalin is responsible for our large brain size, and that it spread recently and quickly through the modern human population . I hadn’t heard anything like that, but it would certainly be interesting if true. Do you think you could you point me to a link?
It’s actually been quite a few years since I’ve seen any mention of microencephalin, but last I heard the gene had different variants in Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa — and since those populations diverged much further back than 37,000 years I don’t see how there could have been a recent sweep. Also, Neanderthal brains were as large as our, if not larger, so what would account for that? (Really interesting recent NYT article about Neanderthal brains here).
With respect, Nathan, quite a lot of what you’re posting is desperately calling for a [citation needed] tag! I don’t take issue with a statement like “some scientists are currently thinking that…” but you’re stating – both in comments and in your comic – a lot of things as absolute fact, which are at best well-supported theory and at worst just educated conjectures.
This is not the same as legal research, where you can rely on your primary sources and paraphrase the laws on the books. When you say “Archaic Homo sapiens didn’t have words” that is stating as fact something that is not supported as fact by the literature. I appreciate what you’re reaching for in this part of your comic – I even agree with it! – but I’m concerned by what I see as overconfidence in the particular set of theories you’re presenting as settled science.
One of the main goals of this comic from its inception has been to present concepts WITHOUT citations or case names or anything academic. That’s the kind of stuff that turns off my target audience and interferes with clarity. That said, I do make the effort to ensure that my assertions aren’t coming out of left field. Plus, if I get something wrong, I know I can rely on my readers to let me know (and I’m glad that they will!)
i think the comic threads that reference and support needle just right. just keep doing it, Nathan.
Thanks, Robert! More is on the way.
If I may offer anything, your Donald Trump characters should be a lot fatter and more disgusting.
“How about homo narrans?” Do I detect a Pratchett reader?
You do indeed! My first drafts of this page even included a caricature of him saying a similar line, complete with big floppy hat. But he preferred “Pan narrans” for reasons that escape me. We’re still genus Homo, aren’t we? I didn’t want to put my words in his mouth.
IIRC, there’s a compelling argument that we’re in the pan genus. We just aren’t comfortable with the idea that we’re that closely related to chimps.
This page reminds me of a TED talk that I liked:
I always laugh when I see the one guy with his hair on fire.