I recently read that it’s a widely held theory that the human brain hasn’t changed in the last 100,000 years. Does this mean that if a newborn from that era magically popped into the year 2002 AD and was brought up by an average family, said child would grow up to speak, think and function not unlike a modern person? If so, is the accumulated knowledge of humanity over the past 100,000 years the only thing that separates us from our distant “primitive” ancestors? Inquiring minds want to know!
My gut feel is that that’s true, I don’t think 100,000 years is a long enough time for any significant evolutionary changes.
I am no expert, I am just interested. From what I have read, as I understand things:
DNA evidence suggests that all humans now living are decended from a relatively small group of humans that existed about 100,000 years ago. Some things must have changed since then - the human species now comprises a number of identifiable races with distinctive characteristics. So, there has been time for change - but have the changes been significant.
Early human history is conventionally divided into three major periods. The old, middle and new stone ages.
About 100,000 years gets you into the old stone age. The old stone age finds includes tools, but they are almost painfully primative and changed only very slowly over a period of tens of thousands of years. These were dark times.
A bit more than 10,000 years ago the middle stone age got going and the rate of change accelerated out of all recognition. Advances that took a thousand years before, now took place in a few generations. Before they knew it, humanity entered the new stone age - sophisticated tools, pottery, farming etc.
Something must have happened in the old stone age to allow this flowering of human intellect. I cannot belive it was just culture - it has to be more fundemental. It think a baby of 10,000 years ago would be quite at home in 2002, but 100,000 years? The differences would be nothing an anatomist could find, but there must be differences - my money would be on language.
http://asiaminor.freeservers.com/paleolithic.html