Haven’t read the parent post yet, but in his book from the 1970s (outdated in numerous ways by now but still very interesting) “Dragons of Eden”, Carl Sagan presents the argument that it was our ability to use tools. Essentially, tools shaped us as much as we shaped them, and as our tools became more advanced, so did our minds.
Re:If Sapiens were a blog post
by curious_fella1 on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @01:24PM
(#20404157)
Yeah that timeline of ~40,000 years being responsible for the large majority of our complex behaviors sounds ridiculously short?
The genetic mutation story is not the most commonly accepted view in anthropology, regardless of what Harari suggests. Perhaps it was more popular at one time when archaeological evidence for "behavioral modernity" abruptly ceased beyond ~50 kya, but if anything, it has been waning as a convincing hypothesis as alternative interpretations[0] and evidence for modernity continues pushing back the ~70 kya date[1].
This isn't to say that a real uptick in complex behavior and cognition didn't happen in the Upper Pleistocene; of course it did. But an absence of archaeological data is a pretty poor basis for inferring a single mutation that caused artefact data to go from sparse to abundant/ complex. Beyond the obvious (simply lacking data), it also seems to gloss over, for example, the possibility of cultural evolution, demographic shifts, etc., all of which require no "Tree of Knowledge mutation".
[0] http://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/files/mcbrearty.pdf
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...