Concepts inherent in grammar, in some current-day languages, are conveyed by words, or suffixes, or phrases in others.
It seems to me that all our current language families are all good for communication, but none are more than maybe 15,000 - 20,000 years old. Perhaps older language families died out because they were much less effective at communication and/or introspection.
I do not know what it was like to be a human, 25,000 years ago, who used a language or languages totally different from what we now have; all I’m saying is their having our genetic makeup and, some of them, the ability to create representational art, does not necessarily make them like us.
This figure is irrelevant to an understanding of how long we have had fully-developed language capability. 10k-20kya is not a date for when the Afroasiatic language family sprang into existence, it is the estimated date of divergence of the languages in that language family that have survived to historic times. There was nothing special about that ancestral language or that time, except in retrospect.
The proto-Afroasiatic language in turn likely shared a common ancestor with other languages which either became extinct or have survived to the present day but have diverged to the extent that the relationship is no longer apparent. It may well share a common ancestor with Indo-European languages and other language families; we just don’t know.
I wil repeat my observation that modern humans went from a bottleneck of a few thousand individuals, to spreading across two to four continents in a matter of 10,000 years or so, starting from about 70,000BC according to most evidence. (Then across the Americas in a matter of a few thousand years, when they found the first way there.)
It may also be a matter of diet, or climate, or the decline of competing (sub)species, but somethng triggered that vast difference in capabilities. Bow and arrow, watercraft, language, conceptual thinking, aggression, … who knows. Something changed.
The definition of “species” is flawed by the fact that nature is not constrained to play in the neat lines humans draw in order to classify things.
Does it really make any sense to have one definition of species? Are bacteria and fungi and amoeba and plants and animals all sufficiently similar that one definition even works?
"Species"is a flawed concept. It’s flawed because human conception of biology is typically flawed.
Ring species, for instance, destroy the notion of interfertility. At any point along the ring, the populations intermingle and interbreed. But take members from each end of the ring and they cannot.
The biggest flaw, IMO, is our lack of common grasp of the variability of time.
For example, let’s take the chicken. What is a “chicken”? Is a red junglefowl a chicken? What about a grey junglefowl, or Sri Lankan green junglefowl? They all look like chickens, but are distinct species. They have separate breeding populations, though domestic chickens have some genetic contribution from all of them.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? An egg, layed by a bird one genetic mutation short of being a chicken. Now measure where one mutation makes that difference. Is it before or after red junglefowl and grey junglefowl split?
Or think about dogs. They are descended from wolves. When in their ancestry were they wolves versus when did the first dogs appear? What is the line?
Those aren’t answerable questions. Our concept of species is a snapshot out of a continuum. At any point in history, the genetic pool of “chickens” or “dogs” or “humans” is going to be different than other points on the line. We pick the snapshot and draw the lines that look clean, then look at an earlier snapshot and the lines don’t match.
Yeah, like I said, fuzzy around the borders. That’s no reason to favor splitting sapiens and Neanderthals rather than lumping them, though, because any definition that splits them will also be fuzzy around the borders.
The dates don’t line up completely. Sure the earliest evidence of arrows from the Sibudu cave date from c. 72,000 - 60,000 bp – a wide range with c. 70,000 bp at the edge of it. The next observations come from Grotte Mandrin in France, c. 54,000 years ago. That’s a huge jump in time from the c 70,000 bp event. More generally, the 40,000-50,000 bp era is 20,000 to 30,000 years forward from the c. 70,000 bp event. That’s a long time. Heck, 1000 years of cultural evolution is a long time.
The 70,000 bp event does align better with boat travel into Australia. I dunno man, watercraft construction and travel well beyond the horizon, over ocean waters. Sounds human.
It’s also a huge jump in space, across some of the most poorly-studied territory, archaeologically, so plenty of room for more African discoveries to fill that gap.
Not to mention Asian studies. In Japan there’s one site indicating watercraft as early as 84,000 bp. And then, nothing until 50,000 bp. A lot of the best sites covering 40,000 to 50,000 bp are in heavily trafficked Europe. The evidence is a mess. But we know more with greater subtlety than we did 50 years ago, and there’s basis for comparable optimism over the next 50 years.
Even today, we have a decent grasp in single order of magnitude terms. Take the 70,000 bp figure. Round it to 50,000. Did behavioral modernity emerge somewhere between 5000 and 500,000 years ago? Yeah, easily I say, notwithstanding some of the discussion above. Same for any other plausible figure - rounding to 40,000 or 120,000 would work as well.
(Are there fringe estimates outside these ranges? Sure: see The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) also Stephenson, Neil Snowcrash (1992). But those are fringe or outright fiction.)
I’ve seen the reverse of this as a thought experiment used to poke at the question in the OP. If some infants were magically transported from N years ago, and raised like modern children, would we be able to tell them apart from modern children? How big is N?
This is coming at the question from a biological and developmental perspective, not a cultural one.
Swapping infants from Europe and the jungles of South America would clearly show that either group could be raised to learn the language and culture of the other. Both groups are completely modern humans, even if one has a better grasp of frog based poisons.
Thanks for that clear phrasing. I’m sorry to be so dense about this, but how well can we distinguish “biological and developmental” from “cultural” based on the arceological record?
I am not at all an expert in this, so hopefully my answer isn’t too far from the truth.
I think the assumption is that a modern skull (even if thousands of years old) would hold a modern brain. So humans with those skulls should have all of the mental abilities that we have today.
The embiggening of the brain started when Homo split from Pan (chimps and bonobos) 4 million years ago (or so). At some point, in some Homo ancestor, the brain got big enough to have most of the capacity we have today. I don’t know when that was, and it is highly debated topic.
Holy moley. I haven’t thought of that book for years. People actually took it seriously back in the day. Today it sounds like somebody new throwing out their theory as a thread starter.
I came across an interesting paper online from 2016. Carbon 14 dating caps out at 50,000 years; during the 1990s it only went to 40,000 years. Armed with more precise radiological methods, scholars Katerina Douka and Tom Higham revisited samples from 2 Russian Caucasus archeological sites. They found significant errors, leading them to conclude that the samples were older than previously thought by perhaps 10,000 years or more if I’m reading them properly. Estimation errors apparently increase when dating artifacts near 50,000 bp with carbon 14.
Right. That is my (very ignorant) assumption. So the modern skull/big brain happened (very roughly) 300k BP. But many/most folk here seem to be arguing that something else happened closer to 30-100k ago. Maybe associated with physiological changes allowing more sophisticated language, or based on artifacts such as cave art, bow and arrow, burial, etc.
I’ve read the wiki page on behavioral modernity a couple of times and am looking forward to reading Pinker. But I’m personally having difficulty understanding how a bundle of cultural advancements “originates” a new type of human. I’m interested in learning why it is not reasonable to assume what happened 30-100k BP was that some combination of factors - perhaps leisure, population density, occupation of a specific location, or maybe just a “tipping point” following the cumulative effect of x generations of culture - triggered some abilities which had previously been latent within humans.
You can learn a lot by inspecting skulls, but I doubt whether you can definitely measure language ability. Phrenology is a pseudo-science after all.
Me too! Frankly though I doubt whether we’ve figured this out definitely: some experts seem to think big changes occurred after the 70,000 bp population bottleneck, while others are gradualists. I suspect that the true story is even more complicated: much of recorded history involves accident after all.
You need to factor in possible malnourishment in the pre and post-natal environment as well as lead exposure if you are a Boomer, Gen-X, or early Millennial from the late 20th century. In terms of borderline fictional headcanon I’d assume the same kind of abilities starting some 100 or 2000 years after the Great Darkening or Toba supereruption of 74,000 bp, assuming your family, clan, and tribe are prosperous. Before that I’d speculate about emerging abilities, of the kind that permitted ocean voyages in freaking canoes.
To be clear, I have no idea of what I’m talking about. My dating has been all over the map in this thread as I’ve been struggling with my ignorance.
I don’t know what the anthropologists who talk about the 70,000BC bottleneck base those claims on, and how accurate they are. But obviously, earlier sub-species spread across Eurasia from africa, and no doubt pre-70KBC versions of homo sapiens sapiens did too. So why do we consider that only that bottleneck group is responsible for our entire population of today (plus some interbreeding)?
I’ve seen off-hand references, but not a definitive analysis.
I think that the evidence for the population bottleneck comes from genetic studies of modern humans from around the globe. So it accounting for the entire population of today is more like the starting point than the conclusion.
Here is a recently published one. Appeal to authority, because I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the work: It was published in Science, so it has probably undergone pretty thorough peer review, and is an important finding. (Science has certainly published some stinkers, but in general the articles there are going to be of very high quality.)
Wangjie Hu et al. Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition.Science381,979-984(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.abq7487
They used some fancy genetic analysis to determine that between 800 – 900 kya (kila years ago) the homo genus bottlenecked to about 1200 breeding individuals, and then stayed around this size for about 100 ky. Figure 5 is a diagram showing this. The African dispersal happened about 150 – 200 kya.
Thanks, but not the same timeframe. This one was much farther back, 900,000 vs 70,000 years.
Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction.