The Sapient Paradox (a warning for us?)

Might the "gossip trap" be once again inhibiting our advancements?

More on the "gossip trap"

The evolution of gods, religion and religious belief

Excerpt (from 1st link above): "The most significant developments in society and technology have all occurred over the past 10,000 years or so. That includes the agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital revolutions, not to mention the dawn of religion, money, and any of the other symbolic concepts that separate Homo sapiens from other species.

We don’t know much about human activities beyond 10,000 years ago.

But we do know that prehistoric people were genetically and intellectually equivalent to modern humans; research indicates that the level of intelligence required for history’s major societal and technological advancements evolved as early as 60,000 years ago when our ancestors began migrating out of Africa.

This begs the question: What took us so long? Why did humans spend 50,000 years (or more) in seemingly uneventful prehistory — with hunter-gatherers living the exact same way across thousands of generations — before starting on the trajectory that took us from cave paintings to (almost) self-driving cars in the comparative blink of an eye?

This question lies at the heart of the sapient paradox, a problem first formulated by the British archeologist and paleolinguist Colin Renfrew in a 1996 essay for Modeling the Human Mind titled, “The sapient behaviour paradox: how to test for potential?”

The sapient paradox has since cemented itself as one of the great unsolved mysteries of human existence. It stands alongside the Fermi paradox (named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi), which asks why Earth appears to be the sole harbinger of life in our seemingly infinite Universe.

While there is no commonly accepted solution to the sapient paradox, several neuroscientists and archeologists have produced alluring hypotheses based on new discoveries related to ancient humans, as well as the brains that we inherited from them.

Preconceptions of prehistory

One possibility is that we haven’t given enough credit to examples of human development that took place in the distant past. Upon closer inspection, prehistory may not have been as uneventful or simplistic as it is often presented.

In their book The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow push back against the notion that hunter-gatherers lacked clearly defined social hierarchies, a notion that dates back to the Enlightenment-era rivalry between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Instead, Graeber and Wengrow argue there is reason to believe that prehistoric social hierarchies were not only surprisingly complicated but also diverse, with some isolated pockets of people resorting to extreme egalitarianism while others organized themselves along the lines of chattel slavery.

But that’s not all. Archeological studies have long suggested that complex speech and self-conscious reflection developed around 40,000 BC, which is also around the time Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis are thought to have coexisted in southwestern Europe.

These transitions were accompanied by a host of other new behaviors, including the refinement of stone tools from “flakes” to blades, the production of artifacts and personal adornments made from bones, antlers, and ivory, and the appearance of naturalistic art in modern-day France and Spain.

More recent discoveries suggest some of these behaviors occurred even earlier, in Africa. Evidence of symbolic expression in the form of intentional patterns of red ochre, found in Blombos Cave, near Cape Town, dates back to 70,000 BC, while some experts argue speech developed 200,000 years ago."