Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye...
by erikpukinskis on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @09:33PM
(#20631286)
> the archaeological record seems to indicate that it's like one day we simply 'woke up.'
Either that or the kinds of artifacts we look for simply don’t last longer than 70k years on a planet like this.
Or, it’s just rare enough that, when combined with the cost of excavation and the fact that scholarship builds on scholarship, it’s just not the kind of evidence scholars are going to dig far past we’ll established boundaries to find.
Lots of possible explanations for the data.
Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye...
by xenadu02 on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @12:23PM
(#20626628)
It is entirely possible the capacity for this existed but was not being used. That would explain why it spread so rapidly... perhaps most humans already had the capacity?
Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye...
by pickdenis on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @12:50PM
(#20626958)
I think it's implied that the capacity was there, just no impetus.
Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye...
by pantalaimon on Wednesday August 07, 2019 @05:38AM
(#20633162)
This all reminds me of the Bicameral Mind hypothesis, although that dates that point of 'waking up' much later.
The point here is that the archaeological record seems to indicate that it's like one day we simply 'woke up.' Whomever was fortunate enough to experience such a mutation first would have had a tremendous competitive advantage. The degree in intellectual advancement is such that they would have probably been significantly better at just about everything -- most importantly in surviving and spreading their genes. Now take this person and what would likely have been their vast number of offspring. They could effectively take over the world. And I suppose, in a manner of speaking, they did.