Interesting item on Slashdot: it starts, we are becoming futuristic and need medical assistance to reproduce successfully.
“Check out the big brain on Brett.” -Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction
Yes, this was brought up on the “has evolution stopped” thread, it’s an interesting example. Mother/infant mortality at childbirth was high and has dropped dramatically, so it’s plausible in this example that the relaxation of natural selection may have been a large enough effect to have resulted in a population genetic change in just a few generations.
But we know that body size can change quickly in response to either selection or environment. So it’s equally plausible that the change is fully explained by environmental changes, e.g. babies are bigger because nutrition is better.
And, again, remember that it’s not sufficient to demonstrate that body size is a heritable genetic trait. Quite obviously it is. It’s a question of whether there has been a population genetic change in the period in question.
A couple of disagreements on the c-section paper.
Overall a media fail.
The article presents no data about actual fetopelvic disproportion and is not based on data. All the article does is present a hypothetical model that attempts to explain why there is a baseline rate of fetopelvic disproportion and the model’s predictions about the potential impact of C-sections in industrialized societies on that rate.
Bolding mine.
I’m coming to this conversation late, but have read the whole discussion with many really interesting posts, especially on the development of agriculture, writing and evolution. I’d like to comment on the OP:
I am debating some of the assumptions in the term “superior thinkers”. I am not for a moment suggesting that writing was not a brilliant leap of intellect, especially when it leaped from pictographic to phonetic. Nor am I doubting the huge benefits in the written record. But I would like to address the idea that we are so vastly superior in thinking than [yes, I know that I am exaggerating the comments here] the poor simple hunter gatherers.
They didn’t have literacy. They did have an alternative - orality - my area of academic research. Orality includes the methods by which non-literate cultures store a vast amount of information in memory using an array of mnemonic technologies.
It has taken me two books, one academic and one just out for the mainstream, to explain much of this, but here are a few points I want to make:
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Someone above mentioned that writing would reduce our ability to use memory as Socrates (via Plato) warned. He was right. Is that a problem? No necessarily, but I am convinced we can improve education markedly by learning from non-literate cultures on memory (they know far more about implementing memory methods than we do) and melding their mnemonic technologies with literacy.
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Australia has the longest continuous culture in the world with art traditions tracing back 50,000 years or so - changing and not static, but continuous. There is some evidence of farming, but let’s assume hunter gatherer for simplicity. They haven’t been nomadic (wandering) for thousands of years. They were mobile - that is moving between known sites, usually over an annual cycle, to optimise access to resources and enable plant and animal populations to recover from their hunting and gathering.
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A fully initiated Elder (we have very few left) is effectively walking around carrying in memory a field guide to all the animals (including hundreds of invertebrates), another to the plants (hundreds), navigation (hundreds of kilometres at the least), star charts, complex genealogies … the list goes on and on. All held in memory. I have shown that the same pattern can be seen in cultures across the world - Native American, Pacific Islander, African. One study documented the Navajo classification of over 700 insects all held in memory including ID, habitat, behaviour and life cycles. Of those only 1 was eaten, 10 are pests and all the rest as knowledge for knowledge sake and linked into understanding of their environment. (I can give the citation.) And that’s just insects!
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My research shows how indigenous cultures embed their knowledge system in the landscape, built environment and an array of memory devices. The ancient Greek method of loci is a simplified version of this. Someone above mentioned the Inca and their knotted cord device, the khipu (quipu). The Inca used the combination used by all non-literate societies I explored - the landscape used as the method of loci (in the Inca case, the ceques) integrated with portable memory devices. The Inca did it with flair! I now use variations of these devices and the khipu is the most adaptable.
I could waffle on and on about this - it’s been my obsession for the last ten years, but I will attempt restraint.
If you judge intellectual achievement on what your culture values, then others will always be inferior, and you will have the “superior thinking” granted in the OP. Judge on the ability to identify every plant and animal in your environment, including those for which you have no practical use, and indigenous cultures would consider your thinking very inferior indeed. Judge on knowing the landscape and its history and you would probably fail. There is research in Australia showing Aboriginal cultures who have retained geographic information for thousands of years accurately, as islands formed and climate changed since the last ice age. These memory methods are incredibly robust.
After 40 years in education, I left to do my PhD and then write the two books based on indigenous memory of pragmatic information. I am now consulting with teachers very excited about implementing these ideas - grounding knowledge in firm structures, using art, music and wildly imaginative narrative as a way to memorise contemporary curriculum in a structured way to enable playing with ideas in exactly the way Socrates feared we would lose.
I have used these memory methods for a number of years now and they are simply extraordinary and can enhance our contemporary lives amazingly. I have applied the research to Neolithic and Archaic monumentality - but that is another whole story!
I suppose the question comes down to - yes, we have stopped using the ability to remember vast amounts, thanks to writing and computers and other “technology” or culture. But, we still have the brains with the genetically endowed capacity to perform these acts. Physically, are we no better or no worse than a human of say, 40,000 years ago in terms of memory capability? Actors can still remember entire plays - heck, so can fans remember whole movies. The amount of completely useless trivia some people store is astounding. the difference is, there’s a lot less value in it in this age of reference books and google. It’s only good for winning Trivial Pursuit.
Not a doubt that we still have the same brains able to perform the memory feats. An actor remembering an entire play or whole movies is pretty trivial by comparison even to the oratory of ancient Greeks and certainly to the memory feats of indigenous elders. Memory capability is the same - or similar - I can’t give academic citation on that! But why do we memorise all the trivia you mention? Why not use our memories to memorise useful information on which we can build?
Google is only useful if you know what to google. Reference books are linear in text - I write them and can now feel the limitations - and advantages. I cannot put in a book or goggle what I can do now in memory. Memory methods are far more integrated - it is almost impossible to understand the difference without trying it. I must publish more of the hyper-excited feedback from readers who are implementing these methods on my blog. That might help me.
One of my memory experiments, as I call them, has enabled me to memorise a field guide to all the birds in my state - 408 - in taxonomic order. If I reeled them off from memory and all the associated information, it would take far longer than any play or movie. It would also be far more boring! I am now going up to all of Australia - over 800 of them. I used to struggle with the day of the week! When out birding, I can work from an exhaustive list. My husband is a much more experienced birder. He has learned to ID birds the more usual way - learn as you go. when we see a bird he can’t recognise, I can list all possibilities and we work from there. He has started asking all sorts of questions which we then explore - why is that bird in the same family as another quite dissimilar? What is the common factor? And so on. It has changed the way we engage with the birds and all the plants and animals in the various habitats. That is just one example. I am doing 35 such experiments. (Must update my website, I only have 33 there!)
I do wish that I could explain better how different it is in your head when using these methods.
Re: lynn-42’s point #2, I think we can safely assume that the “longest continuous culture” is to be found in Africa, not Australia. Just based on genetics, one would expect to find that among the !Kung-San or Mbuti peoples.
Your question is extremely controvertial and politically incorrect, that is why it has taken so many varied answers. The modern dogma presupposes that all modern populations are equal in mental measurements and so equally trainable. Evolutionary psychology, itself not a quite popular methodology for the explanation of human behaivior nowadays buys into that, while more politically incorrect strains of evo psychology recognize inter-group differences. My intuitive guess is that a person from 50.000 years ago brought up in a modern setting would behaive quite modernly, however it is not sure if he could be a mental equal to someone of the western world. The probability exists, but it is quite low. Otherwise he could devolve to a petrol-sniffing beggar.
Some comments and related not all linearly connected …
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In fact there is quite a doubt. We know (see this article link previously given) that there have in fact been many genes that impact brain function that have changed since HG times. If culture once selected for those who could hold large funds of specific facts in a fairly stable location with greater intergenerational reproductive success and, hypothetically, later culture selected for those who could expend their brain power on creatively combining established generalized abstract concepts into new ideas, then the ability to remember large funds of specific individual facts would be expected to decrease and the ability to generalize and develop abstract concepts and to creatively integrate them into new ideas would increase. So if memory/information processing style has any inheritable basis it could very well have been selected for differently across cultural time frames.
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Clearly the tendencies to process information in different ways has a strong genetic basis … think merely about the spectrum from those have a laser beam focus on one subject at a time and have a large fund of specific facts (think some sports geeks) to those who are almost always parallel processing information, thinking about not just the task at hand but are also thinking about 8 or so other things to some degree too, easily distracted perhaps, but also more likely to make creative connections between the subject putatively “at hand” and others in their mental space background, and come up with the new idea as a result (think many artists and comedians).
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Of course in real societies both ends of the spectrum and points in between have niches … one processing style is not per se “better.” Imagine if you will that HG tribe … sitting around grinding collected grains and seeds into a flour. One of the group is of the style to think about many things at once and is not focused exclusively on grinding as well as possible but also is thinking about walking by the river earlier and seeing things rolling in the river and how things rolling in the river got broken apart … huh … maybe we could make something that took the river rolling and made it roll something to grind the grains for us? Hopefully he blurted it out loud and before he went onto other thoughts and the narrow focus person heard it and stayed focused on how to make it happen … together as a group creating the first water mill. (Okay not how mills were likely first come up with but you get the idea.) In social groups there is a place for the person with the large fund of individual facts, who can be the oral historian and living encyclopedia, and for the person who is creative connecting disparate ideas and seeing novel relationships.
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The OP was focused on literacy but one can pose the same question and speculations about numeracy. HGs would have a need for the concepts of “one” “two” “three” and “many” but the ability to deal and manipulate larger specific amounts would not have been a skill selected for until minimally the keeping of flocks and/or trade between groups. The first drive to have symbolic representations may have been cave art or porn but after that it was likely for accounting and not written language.
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The ability/skill to remember many individual facts is, within a larger society, less important than the ability/skill to know how to access, manipulate, and analyze facts stored by the society. Back something like 35 years ago heard a lecture by a Dr. Larry Weed, who popularized the problem oriented medical record. He drew a circle on the whiteboard and told us that this circle represented all he knew of medicine. He then drew a circle 50% bigger that mostly overlapped that circle and obviously also contained more. That he said was what the smartest person in his medical school class knew of medicine. Is, he asked us, that person a better doctor than he is? No, he answered as he drew a circle around most of the rest of the whiteboard clearly containing both circles and much much more, because, this is what the world knows of medicine and what makes us good doctors is how we access and manage all of that for the good of our patients. He in fact advocated articulately for a medical education that focused less on stuffing in as large a fund of knowledge as possible than on developing the skills-based approach that had greater emphasis on how to use the tools of information technology (which were then just emerging) more effectiviely.
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Relatedly I heard of a study a couple of years back (and poetically enough given I am relatively older, I can’t find the source) that compared what those raised in the age of smartphones and those before remembered of a particular lecture. Those before focused on remembering the details and those after on the broader picture and how to find the details again later.
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Do you have kids? If so do you remember playing the game “Memory” with them when they were late preschool to very early school aged? That’s the game that has matched pairs of card laid face down in a large grid. Each player gets to uncover two cards a turn and keeps them if they match and turns them back over if they do not. Of course remembering the location of the ones turned over before and where they are is key. Up to early school age kids kick ass at that game very very commonly beating the pants off of most adults. Certainly mine whooped me at that game all the time … up to their getting into first grade. Greater eidetic memory skills (which may in fact be linked in neurologic mechanism to the visual memory techniques used in the method of loci and non-literate landscape techniques) is in fact much more common among preschoolers than in among those who have begun to learn to read and decreases more as abstract thinking skills develop.
gotta love the internet for trivia.
The Odyssey is about 700K so about 120,000 words.
The Bible by comparison is 783,000 words and there are (were?) people who can recite it from memory. Similarly the Quran is about 77,500 words and there are people who can recit it from memory.
Shakespeare’s plays range from Hamlet at 30,500 words to Comedy of errors, only 14,700 words. So memorizing a number of Shakespeare’s plays in not unlike a bard who knew the Illiad and Odyssey.
Humans are particularly good at sequential memory - give someone a prompt and they more easily remember what comes next.
As for political correctness, the demonstrated evidence is that the “bell curves” of assorted groups overlap so much that even if the supposition is true (and how do you prove it, how do eliminate cultural and environmental factors?) the overlap is such that no assertion can be made about an individual’s mental abilities. Indeed, in the news recently was the recent study of education across the world; for collections of pretty much the same population profiles, from province to province, there was a definite difference in scholastic performance - suggesting environmental effects are as pronounced as genetic, if not more so.
(I’ve always been of the opinion that hunter societies - or mixed hunting and agriculture -have an edge over purely agricultural societies, especially feudal ones, since hunting most likely requires a great deal more analytical brain power; along with the suggestion the mighty hunter probably has a reproductive advantage.
Hunters and pastoralists get more protein, so they become stronger and more intelligent. In a primitive setting, they easily beat agriculturalists most of the time.
Cite?
Simple reality is that if that was the case then agriculture would not have spread and become the dominant lifestyle. Adequate calories was more vital to winning the competition (most fundamentally meaning increasing the population with the trait over generation) than was superior nutritional diversity (lack of which was likely the biggest problem with agricultural society nutrition, more than too low of protein per se). Food production allowed enough calories for more to live long enough to reproduce, even if more often sickly, and hunter-gatherer groups either died out or were accreted into agricultural societies.
A settled farming existence also fostered invention of new technologies and I would bet among those new technologies were improved weapons and organized defense systems to protect crops and herds from being raided, even going on the offensive as new land was needed.
Well said.
I also question a related proposition in the prior comment (my bold):
I’d agree that cooperative hunting is probably correlated with greater flexible intelligence than solo hunting. But it’s the cooperation that’s the important element, not the hunting. The human evolutionary niche has been one of supremely sophisticated cooperation in all of our endeavors, whether hunting, farming, warring or building space telescopes. It’s a compelling hypothesis that an important driving force in the evolution of our intelligence was the need to manage complex social relationships for mutual benefit (while monitoring for cheating) in order to cooperate effectively. If anything, I think the larger and more complex communities that became possible after the development of agriculture put intelligence at an even greater premium.
Do you mean that quantity won over quality? Because agricultural societies always emphasized quantity. Much carbohydrate which promotes obesity, fast growth but a sickly body, closely spaced births and a short lifespan. And also a strong despot above you inventing godsent commandments which keep the sheep in place. The only good side to this dehumanizing tyranny is the more predictable and constant supply of food. That might be the allure of agriculture to the hunter-gatherers around.
About pastoralists and hunters/pastoralists beating agriculturalists, see just how easily the Mongols expanded and how easily also the Egyptians and sedentary populations of the Near East were losing after a time period in history. On the other hand, Mesoamericans were more intelligent and had acknowledged the detrimental role of a high population and an only-carbohydrate diet soon after establishing civilizations. So they implemented methods to thin the population, like human sacrifice and sometimes cannibalism of those killed to gain the essential protein.
I think you could safely debate it - I am not tied strongly to that belief, but you could not safely assume that Australia doesn’t have the oldest continuous culture. Recent studies argue it - the link to the report in Nature is in the fourth paragraph.
Some about the period of coexistence of Hunter Gatherers and early farmers here. The HGs seem to have coexisted with farmers in Europe for quite a while before the HGs disappeared, be it by accretion, by death, or by adoption of the farming lifestyle in their own separate groups.
Moe about HGs … there is this popularized concept about how idyllic HG life was. Easy pickins to hunt and gather up all they needed with short work days and lots of lounging around. Nevermind that the basis for that image is some pretty crap research, just play that out as a theoretical thought experiment. Enough food (both calories and nutritional quality to boot) to support a population with relatively little effort, time to lounge about, what is going to happen? Population is going to increase unless something intervenes. So what intervenes?
Either it is going to increase to the point that the food supply does not support the population and some die off, or the social order prevents some large number from mating as in some animal packs, or there are other causes of excess early death, such as regular warfare. The last choice seems to be the most likely: “violent conflict accounted for 30 percent of all deaths before contact with Europeans.”
correlophus yes. Nutritionally calorie quantity won over quality of nutrition. Quality does not help if there is not enough of it to feed both you and a kid or two. Now of course we have that 2000 year period in Europe where HGs and farmers coexisted. It may be that trade occurred between the groups. But to the degree that the HGs had game to catch and ample food to gather their diverse diet was nutritionally superior. But the big game was disappearing by then, whether due to being hunted into extinction of due to climate change, and feeding a growing family on rabbits does not always deliver enough rabbits.
No debate that inequality was part and parcel of the farming culture mix. Of course though it existed in HG societies too.
In any case “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong” is not the issue. Successful at the result of more people with the trait in subsequent generations is.
Just want to thank you for such an interesting and thought provoking response, DSeid. It seems that I have taken for granted a common belief without researching enough. It doesn’t impact on my writing to date as I am looking at the mnemonic technologies at a level that does not go to the depth that you talk about. But my future research collaborations do head there - lots more work to do!
In terms of idealising HG lifestyles, I couldn’t agree more. Humans are humans, and HGs are no different in having admirable behaviours, some less so and some just different and the decision about what is “admirable” being very much culturally biased.
In all the hunter gatherer cultures I looked at, and small scale settled ones, the egalitarianism really only applied to material wealth. There was certainly no equality in power, but the source of power was control of information. Knowledge was power (the title of my PhD thesis!), hence “secret business”, “secret societies” and so on.
Not really. You are referencing a typically sloppy science article published in the popular press. The first hint is from the very title of your article: Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms. Emphasis added to the word that doesn’t belong there.
All one needs do is go to the actual scientific paper, linked to in your article, to see the missing link (pun intended)
Emphasis added. Too often the popular press focuses on our species post-Exodus from Africa, and what happened since then, as if our species had no history before that.
It is more plausible to regard australian culture as the more continuous one, because Pygmies and Bushmen, although genetically older groups, have been more or less in contact with the more recent Africans for the last centuries and so absorbed many cultural influences from them. For example today pygmies mostly speak their neighbours’ languages.