I have rarely seen you use an exclamation mark! Seriously though, this was as clear an exposition of the necessity of a shift in analytical methodolgy as I have seen anywhere. I learned “classical” population genetics when it was taught by Bruneto Chiarelli during his time at the Univeristy of Toronto. But it is not something that can deal with certain questions that now occur to me. Perhaps you can help. Forgive me please for a lengthy introduction to the question I want to put to you. Ihave been writing about this, trying to think it through, for several years now.
The transformation of anatomically archaic to anatomically modern humans need not have started with any change in the biology or genetics underlying cognitive prowess. It might have started with a behavioural response to increased risks during a time of repeated environmental tumult. Tinkering with a plan to more effectively stalk an antelope, or to drive a herd into an ambush — or over a cliff — is taken to a whole new level in the Middle Palaeolithic. Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks had a similar suggestion in The Revolution that Wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior: (Journal of Human Evolution (2000) 39, 453–563 Academic Press.)
“It is clear that the features diagnostic of physical modernity emerge in conjunction with MSA technologies. In this paper we present evidence to support the presence of modern human behaviors in subsaharan Africa at remote times far predating any such traces outside Africa. We contend that the appearance of modern behaviors accompanied or even preceded the appearance of H. sapiens during the African MSA, suggesting that the behaviors may perhaps have driven the anatomical changes seen in the fossils. We also suggest that these behaviors developed gradually over a substantial period of time and sporadically in different parts of the continent.” (page 487 — my emphasis)
The comprehension of whole cascades and feedbacks, involving multiple variables, may have begun with the processional learning involved in the manufacture of stone tools for specific purposes, and especially for making compound technologies.
However it began, adding analogy to processional thinking enables other applications to longer and more complex feedbacks as well. This is however, exactly the kind of analytic thinking seen among modern people in all economies, even if they apply it to city planning, architecture, compound interest, fine cuisine, plotting novels, designing fashions, creating nuclear plants, testing and applying scientific hypotheses, calculating annual sales increments, planning retirement financing, or putting a man on the moon.
I think this level of cognition was clearly in place before people could even begin to visualize how a whole ecosystem could be manipulated — “taken care of”- over generations.
The level of thinking, required to understand an entire ecosystem well enough to effectively manipulate it, had to already exist before this kind of cultural adaptation could happen. So I find it telling that the ecosystem management and technologies seen in today’s hunter-gatherers requires cumulative observations and processional learning, likely over many generations and across many resource landscapes, to create innovations that solve technical adaptive problems in conceptually challenging ways.*
As this cultural system was coming together, it is very plausible that successful components of it appeared here and there and were discovered and lost again, like elements of any other cultural knowledge. During the extreme drought bottlenecks, practices that worked were the kinds of long term ecological wisdom incorporated into practices that not only allowed parents to keep their children and grandchildren alive, but even to remedy the ecological destruction caused by African mega-droughts and Eurasian glacial advances. As these populations in refuge areas were doing whatever they could to hang on, knowledge of successful long term strategies may have spread rapidly.
Very plausibly, the technology, ideas, and practical applications, were already occurring in a similar piecemeal fashion among all archaic humans in Africa and Eurasia throughout at least the last 400,000 years, as the scale and frequency of climate oscillation increased. I suppose it is possible that there was a shift in gene frequencies, during the middle Pleistocene, increasing proportions of people who were reflective, analytical, tinkerers, or possessed gifts of conceptual or integrative intelligence. I would be surprised, however, if such shifts were not also occurring in all human populations on the planet… and for the same reasons.
Is there any way that the archaic genomic data available today could test this hypothesis?
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* When you begin to devise and execute plans that will reward you with higher numbers of buffalo in twenty years, and to devise and execute plans for increasing secondary growth meadowland and younger forest, to achieve resource goals unlikely to be realized in a single lifetime, it is no longer just reacting in instinctive or even conditioned ways to your environment.
You are no longer just an animal in a ecological niche, you transform each ecosystem to your own needs by conceptualizing the needs of all the other living things in that ecosystem, and promoting an overall species diversity and an ecological stability that favours human survival.
You need not find your ecological niche, you make it.
You need a different order of conceptual models. You will have think more comprehensively, and in longer chains of causality that last for hundreds of years. These kinds of cultural paradigms cannot become normalized, nor even appear, overnight. It takes generations of observation and discussion to reach the level regularly found among hunter-gatherers. To give one example: when I first arrived to begin my fieldwork among the Kalahari hunter-gatherers, I expected to find them occasionally hunting giraffe. I had seen the film made in the far western Kalahari by John Marshall, a film called “The Hunters” — which showed a giraffe hunt. So I was puzzled to see plenty of giraffe herds but no evidence of their being hunted by the Kua. I asked about this. I was told that a giraffe that “offered itself” would not be refused, but that this was extremely rare, and that giraffes were not generally targeted. If I wanted the whole story, I was told, I should go and see a certain woman.
So I did.
I found her in a campsite deeper into the remote area, very near the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. She was tending her grandchildren and eagerly agreed to answer my questions about giraffe. Apparently she has the local expert; obsessively interested in anything to do with giraffe since childhood. She had assembled a massive number of observations, both on her own, and from accounts of hunters and other people, and handed down through many generations. I found this out in later interviews. Her answer to my query was masterful in its simplicity and accuracy. Hunting giraffe is unwise, she said “because they were the midwives of the Acacia tree.” God had made the giraffe, she told me, just tall enough to eat the leaves and harvest the pods of the tree, because they would then deposit the offspring of the tree far from the parent plant. She had often noticed the young sprouting from giraffe dung heaps.
I noted all this down and essentially forgot about it until many years later when I learned that these Acacias are, in fact, woody legumes: through a symbiotic bacterial colony in their roots, they fix nitrogen. In the sandy Kalahari, these trees and other legumes were essential species that permitted grasses and herbs to flourish.
Giraffe and Acacia were also symbiotes, equally critical in keeping the savanna green.
She knew.
This level of conceptualization, of relationships between plants and animals, as parts of integrated communities, and the operationalization of this understanding into deliberate and practical interventions, goes beyond mere “planning ahead”.
To develop such a sophisticated understanding, even among a minority within a population, involves the integration of many empirical observations, verified and accumulated, over many lifetimes. The wider this effort is shared, the more people are involved in discussions of all relevant data and concepts, and the larger the geographic area involved, the more comparative material can be assessed, and the more continuities — as well as exceptions and special cases — can be discovered. Provided the dedicated observers and discussants can explain and demonstrate that certain new ideas and practices achieve better results than the previous customs and technologies, there can be a shift within the whole society, a shift that may accelerate the “borrowing” of any successful innovation over much larger culture areas.
