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Douglas Knight's avatar

I had trouble parsing part of this, so let me rewrite it in my own words:

There used to be a question of why there was 100ky of "anatomically modern humans" before there were "behaviorally modern humans." Recently, the evidence of behavioral modernity has been pushed back, so there no longer is a gap in time between anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity. But this gap was only the tip of the iceberg. It was a tidy way of talking about the mystery, but removing it doesn't remove the actual mystery; comparing anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity is a category error, because anatomical modernity is an endpoint, whereas behavioral modernity is a starting point. The brains got larger for millions of years, leveling off 150kyo, and then behavioral change accelerated, lots of new behavior starting then. But if the big brains lead to the modern behavior, why didn't the behavior accumulate for millions of years? This is the real mystery and moving modern behavior back 100k more years doesn't help address it.

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meekerdb's avatar

I'm surprised that you have not even mentioned language, something which took evolution of the jaw, tongue, throat as well as brain and which would have revolutionized hominid culture. Have you read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I don't know if I believe Jaynes, but he made the importance of language clear to me.

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