A recent paper published in Science argues that our big brains aren’t what ultimately caused early human cultural development. In fact, it took maybe 100,000 years (give or take tens of thousands) for the human brain to find its mojo.
Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a certain degree of migration between subgroups there was also archaeological evidence of modern human behavior.
“As population density increases, people migrate between groups more,” Thomas said during a telephone interview. “That increases the probability that any skill that’s difficult to learn doesn’t get lost or decay.”
Sounds familiar.
I’m re-reading Richard Florida‘s Rise of the Creative Class (it’s actually a better book than I’ve been giving him credit for) and — as any reader of this blog ought to know — he makes basically the same case (in my interpretation):
Density = Creativity = Prosperity
This is the theory that LDNbeta is premised on. In fact, this is the same general notion I advocated in the previous post.
Different people have different knowledge and skills, which complement each other in complex ways. It’s like we’re each a piece of a giant, dynamic puzzle. The more people we meet, and the more ways we interact, the more likely we are to find good creative fits that lead to bigger things.
“The basic idea conceptually is you can have individuals who are really great at inventing ideas and concepts and ways of approaching the world, but you need a certain population density to be able to have that stuff catch hold and spread.”
via aldaily
Update: Here’s much more from American Scientist (via 3qd):
Successive pulses of population expansion and contraction in southern Africa might explain why the Still Bay rose to prominence so abruptly across such a large area and then vanished in less than a millennium, and why the Howieson’s Poort began 7,000 years later and lasted about 5,000 years. For technological and behavioral innovations to be spread widely and rapidly, a cohesive network of social contacts is needed to promote the transmission of new ideas and inventions. Periods of population expansion of the L3 haplogroup could conceivably have created such a network and prompted geographically widespread trade and exchange of high-quality stone and symbolic artifacts across southern Africa. In this hypothesis, the gap between the Still Bay and the Howieson’s Poort represents a period of population contraction, during which social networks weakened or collapsed. The reasons for this calamity remain an enigma…
It might have taken another explosion in population size to reinvigorate this social network across southern Africa, resulting in the widespread transmission of the latest technological innovation associated with the Howieson’s Poort (backed blades for hunting weapons). This integrated, subcontinental network of hunter-gatherer communities was maintained for more than five millennia, but then disappeared about 60,000 years ago, perhaps in response to the population contractions and isolations identified by genetic studies. Similarly sophisticated stone-tool technology did not reappear for another 20,000 years—the end of the Middle Stone Age in East Africa—when there is evidence for renewed gene flow south of the Sahara.
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