How human culture evolved
Chinchero sunday market, at the sacred valley of Urubamba near Cusco, Peru. (Photo: chany14
Paul Ehrlich: We started building a complex culture before we split into human beings and chimps, maybe seven million years ago.
That’s Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Paul Ehrlich: At first, our culture evolved very slowly. We had had the same kind of stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years.
Ehrlich wrote the 1960’s classic, The Population Bomb – and more recently, a book called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment. It’s about how humans came to dominate our planet. Ehrlich said that as human culture itself evolved, so did our power to shape and reshape the planet.
Paul Ehrlich: Sometime — and it’s controversial — between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, there was a culture that’s sometimes called ‘the great leap foreward,’ or the cultural revolution, where suddenly, instead of just having stone tools, we began to get fine needles, and obviously sew good clothes, and do the cave art that’s so famous in Lascaux, and so on. So that changed our culture dramatically.
Fast-forward to about 10,000 years ago and humans start to practice agriculture.
Paul Ehrlich: That was the time where it became possible for one family to grow enough food to support several families. And so the agricultural revolution, maybe, was the single biggest step in that whole course. Otherwise, we’d just be like another big mammal operating on the planet.
The coordination to produce alchoholic beverages must’ve been a great incentive to cooperate and encourage farming.
Is that in any evidence
The coordination to produce alchoholic beverages must’ve been a great incentive to cooperate and encourage farming.
Is that in any evidence for this?
The coordination to produce alchoholic beverages must’ve been a great incentive to cooperate and encourage farming.
Is that in any evidence for this?
The coordination to produce alchoholic beverages must’ve been a great incentive to cooperate and encourage farming.
Is that in any evidence for this?
Might ought to think about an opposing thumb and the concept of sentience as well. Our brains differ in a major way from other primates.
There is evidence to support that the continent of Africa had a large surface nuclear reaction about 800 million years ago. That is where humans are said to have originated. It could very well be that the conjoined chromosome that differentiates our genetic material from that of the great apes is the result of a radioactive effect on our forebears. Radioactive induced mutation, as it were. Also, there was a massive die-off or humans about 75,000 years ago that was likely the result of the Toba Caldera volcano in the Indonesia area. This caused a bottleneck in our genetic evolution.
Fascinating stuff.
Benjamin,
I found your comments to be intriguing. However, there are a number of problems that need to be overcome in order for your analysis to work.
1. The highly radioactive waste generated at Oklo was held in place by granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the deep ground reaction sites. None of it made it to the surface to irradiate human ancestors. [Cowan, G. A. 1976. “A Natural Fission Reactor,” Scientific American, 235:36, pp39]
2. Humans have two less chromosomes as compared to apes. Most scientists favor a fusion of the #2 and #3 karyotypes of apes to form chromosome #2 (your conjoined chromosome) in humans as an explanation. Additionally the DNA sequences of chromosomes 4, 9, and 12 are out of sequence of those of apes as a result of nine [known] pericentric inversions. Radiation generally causes random damage (obliteration) of the coding sequences of the DNA. The nature of such damage is highly unlikely to cause chromosome pair fusion or pericentric inversions. If radiation had affected the population, one would expect to see a higher degree of variability in the X chromosome as compared to other populations not having a lineage traceable to Oklo. Such variability doesn’t exist.
3. Mitochondrial DNA studies show that the appearance of modern man’s most recent common ancestor doesn’t fit with the 1.7 million year timeline that studies at Oklo demonstrated would have been the time of the reactions. [See “Heyer, E., Zietkeiwicz, E., Rochowski, A., Yotova, V., Puymirat, J., and Labuda D. 2001. ‘Phylogenetic and familial estimates of mitochondrial substitution rates: study of control region mutation in deep-rooting pedigrees.’ Am J Hum Genet 69:1113-1126.”] Oklo’s timing doesn’t fit with any other divergence model that I’m aware of.
To be certain, the latest genetic research suggests that man’s relationship to apes is far more complex and convoluted than originally imagined. High levels of radiation in an isolated population of hominoids doesn’t appear to play well in emerging genetic research.