Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - a brief review

I'm a fairly average sleeper for my age, but this morning I gave up a bit before 4am. With the unexpected time I finished Yuval Harari's 2015 book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". (The "finishing" part is a bit unusual, I too often lose interest 80% of the way through many books.)

Sapiens was, I've read, quite popular with the Silicon Valley set. So I was prepared to dislike it from the start. In truth, while I can see why the Captains of Industry were fans, it's not a bad book. I'd grade it as very good to excellent.

I didn't learn much new -- I have read many of the same things as Harari. I was reminded, though, of things I'd forgotten -- and he touched on many of my favorite themes. If I'd read this as a young person I might have found it astonishing.

What are the flaws? He has a weird definition of "The Liberal" and he really dislikes whatever he means by that. He has a thing about Hosni Mubarak -- a loathsome person, but an odd choice for chief villain. He is glib, but that's a necessity in a book like this.  The glibness is somewhat offset by his habit of critiquing his assumptions at the end of each chapter. He's weakest when he strays into the sciences, particularly biology. Since he wrote this book we’ve seen Trumpism, the rise of Xi, and the slow burn of the Left Behind — events that might cause reconsiderations.

I liked the repeated reminder that non-human animals have paid a terrible price for the rise of humanity. Most books of this kind don't consider them.

In a book of this sort one constantly tries to decipher the author's agenda. What does Harari truly think? He clearly admires Buddhism; I would be surprised if he were not a practitioner of the more intellectual forms of Buddhism. He has a love and admiration for capitalism that outshines his self-critique. On the current American spectrum of political ideology he'd be a techno-optimist libertarian to the right of Obama and me (his characterization of the British Empire is more than slightly incorrect.)

Most of the time the book affirmed my own beliefs and reminded me of things I'd forgotten. Sometimes it annoyed me, but in a way that forced me to examine my priors. It's aged well -- even if some of his 2014 near-future predictions look to be still a decade or two away. I recommend it.

What are the neanderthal diseases?

Europeans used to have more Neanderthal DNA than we have now ...

Ancient DNA from last Ice Age unveils distant ancestors underwent significant evolutionary changes | NH Voice

… the percentage of Neanderthal DNA in Europeans 45,000 years ago has declined from between 3% and 6% to around 2% in Europeans today. The researchers think that natural selection has reduced Neanderthal ancestry over time.

… Neanderthal DNA is slightly toxic to modern humans…

Perhaps Neanderthal DNA was more useful during the ice age, but is less useful now. Or perhaps it was never that handy — though hybrids were not rare.

It would be interesting to know what disadvantages/diseases moderns get from Neanderthal genes. Once we might have looked at gene products, but now we know things are rarely so simple. Genes are like letters in the English alphabet, not characters in Chinese. The letter ‘a’ contributes to both “Bad” and “Glad”, but those words (gene products) appear in many sentences and paragraphs (phenotypes).

There have been some early studies …

• Neandertal DNA may raise risk for some modern human diseases: circadian controls, bladder behaviors, nicotine addiction, rapid clotting, allergies (but better resistance to some diseases) … “Some parts of the human genome don’t contain any Neandertal DNA at all, while other parts may be 60 percent or more Neandertal”
• Neanderthals’ DNA legacy linked to modern ailments | Harvard Gazette

I’d wondered about osteoarthritis, but so far that’s not shown up.

Apple TV's PBS station has great shows, but an awful user experience

Anthro prof John Hawks, one of my favorite bloggers, is hosting a sure-to-be-good PBS series called First Peoples. You can stream the (ugh) Flash (ugh) version … too bad it’s not on Apple TV….

Except … it is. It’s just bloody hard to find. The PBS Channel Search menu searches only “Videos”, not “Shows”. To find Shows you have to scroll around … and around … and around… the “Shows” screen. Good luck with that. Once you find a show you can add it to Favorites.

I don’t know if this is something PBS can fix or if it’s some sort of Apple malfunction, but … wow … needs a fix. At the least Search needs to include Shows.

Human domestication, the evolution of beauty, and your wisdom tooth extraction

My 16yo is having his wisdom teeth removed tomorrow. Blame it on human domestication.

The Economist explains the process. Domestication, whether it occurs in humans, foxes, or wolves, involves changes to "estradiol and neurotransmitters such as serotonin" (for example). These changes make humans less violent and better care givers and partners -- major survival advantages for a social animal. They also have unexpected side-effects, like shortened muzzles and flattened faces for wolves, foxes, (cows?) and humans.

Since domesticated humans out-compete undomesticated humans, the physiologic markers of domestication become selected for. They being to appear beautiful. Sex selection reinforces the domestication process.

It seems to be ongoing ...

 The evolution of beauty: Face the facts | The Economist:

... People also seem to be more beautiful now than they were in the past—precisely as would be expected if beauty is still evolving...

Which may be why we are becoming less violent.

Of course a shortened muzzle and smaller mandible have side-effects. Teeth in rapidly domesticating animals don't have room to move. Which is good news for orthodontists, and bad news for wisdom teeth.

See also:

• A link between autism and the domestication of humans and dog: "MET gene selection appears to be related to human and canine domestication, including sociability. Variants of it are associated with autism-like behavior."
• The canid domestication of homo sapiens brutalis

Agriculture and population: which came first?

We're used to thinking that human population (and human misery) boomed when we switched to agriculture. Now it appears that a post-glacial population boom may have inspired agriculture ...

Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Major population expansion in mtDNA of East Asians

... the further analysis showed that the population expansion in East Asia started at 13 kya and lasted until 4 kya. The results suggest that the population growth in East Asia constituted a need for the introduction of agriculture and might be one of the driving forces that led to the further development of agriculture...

Deep history and the lifespan of the australian aboriginal

The paleolithic is the time of the pre-historic hominid tool user. It begins 2.6 million years ago with Australopithecine-like hominid tool users and ends with the last ice age 8,000 years BCE [1].

The paleolithic is divided into three variably defined ranges, something like this: [2]

• Upper: 45,000 - 8000 BCE.
• Middle: 300,000 - 30,000 BCE
• Lower: 2.6 million to 100,000 BCE. (The great age of exploration, including, it seems, rafting [3].)

It's helpful to know this, because it's otherwise hard to understand what Caspari is saying in her recent SciAm article. She claims that humans had short lifespans throughout most of the paleolithic ...

The Evolution of Grandparents - Rachel Caspari - Scientific American

... the Krapina Neandertals are not unique among early humans. The few other human fossil localities with large numbers of individuals preserved, such as the approximately 600,000-year-old Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain, show similar patterns. The Sima de los Huesos people had very high levels of juvenile and young adult mortality, with no one surviving past 35 and very few living even that long...

...We observed a small trend of increased longevity over time among all samples, but the difference between earlier humans and the modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic was a dramatic fivefold increase in the OY ratio ... adult survivorship soared very late in human evolution...

... Lee and I analyzed Middle Paleolithic humans from sites in western Asia dating to between about 110,000 and 40,000 years ago. Our sample included both Neandertals and modern humans, all associated with the same comparatively simple artifacts. ... We found that the Neandertals and modern humans from western Asia had statistically identical OY ratios...

Caspari claims that the great leap in longevity occurred within the past 45,000 years. She seems to think this was a cultural change, but I don't follow her logic. Most modern hunter gatherers age and die at the same rate as eurasians.

In modern human terms forty thousand years is a long time ago. But recent sequencing of 100 year old DNA suggests the indigenous Australians split from other humans before then ...

Gordon's Notes: Deep history - 40,000 years without change

... Based on the rate of mutation in DNA, the geneticists estimate that the Aborigines split from the ancestors of all Eurasians some 70,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians split from each other about 30,000 years ago....

... the split times calculated by the Danish team are compatible with the more reliable archaeological dates, which record the earliest known human presence in Australia at 44,000 years ago. The Aborigines’ ancestors could have arrived several thousand years before this date.

There are a lot of Google hits on the life expectancy of the indigenous Australian. It is usually estimated at 15-20 years less than euro-Australians. That is not, however, all that different from the life expectancy of modern Russians. The data neither supports nor refutes Caspari's hypothesis, but it suggests things are, as usual, complicated.

Anything about the biology of the Australian aboriginal is very sensitive. It's easy to see why.

-- fn

[1] Via Wikipedia, I have just learned that the scientific practice for dating is now BP for "before present," where the present is arbitrarily assigned to 1950 ACE. I've converted to BCE here.
[2] There's obviously no consensus on where to draw these largely artificial boundaries.
[3] The truly great explorers died before modern humans were born.

Update 1/30/2012: From a NYT review of the state of mongrel man (emphases mine):

... little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

Deep history - 40,000 years without change

John Hawks and Dienekes have excellent posts on research that emphasizes the churn and chaos of the melding of the sentient apes into one vast world crushing species. The churn and transformations across Europe surprise everyone.

Paleogenetics is awe inspiring.

Both reference one related story; a story not of transformation but of stasis. The sequencing of a 100 year old hair follicle (yes, science fiction lives) tells the long story of the first Australians (emphases mine) ...

Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration - Nicholas Wade - NYTimes.com

.... The Aboriginal genome bolsters earlier genetic evidence showing that once the Aborigines’ ancestors arrived in Australia, some 50,000 years ago, they somehow kept the whole continent to themselves without admitting any outsiders...

... Based on the rate of mutation in DNA, the geneticists estimate that the Aborigines split from the ancestors of all Eurasians some 70,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians split from each other about 30,000 years ago....

... the split times calculated by the Danish team are compatible with the more reliable archaeological dates, which record the earliest known human presence in Australia at 44,000 years ago. The Aborigines’ ancestors could have arrived several thousand years before this date.

The Aborigine occupation of Australia presents a series of puzzles, starting with the nature of their stone tools. The early stone tools found in Australia are much simpler than the Upper Paleolithic tools that appear in Europe at the same era...

... the first inhabitants of Australia must have possessed advanced boat-building technology to cross from the nearest point in Asia to Sahul, the ancient continent that included Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania until the rise of sea level that occurred at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. But there is no archaeological evidence for boats, Dr. Klein said.

Despite the Aborigines’ genetic isolation, there is evidence of some profound cultural exchange that occurred around 6,000 years ago. The stone tools become more sophisticated, and the population increased. The Aborigines did not domesticate plants or animals, but a wild dog, the dingo, first appears in the archaeological record at this time...

... How the dingo arrived in Australia is an “enigma,” Dr. Savolainen writes, because none of the other elements of Polynesian culture are found there...

... Even stranger, dogs always travel with their masters, yet there is no sign yet of Polynesian genes in the Aborigine population.

“Something remarkable happened in Australia 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, and it involved much more than the dingo,” Dr. Klein said.

50,000 years is a long time to be separated for a rapidly evolving animal. In 2007 Hawks told us "We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals." The European invaders of Australia must have been very different from the Australian aboriginals of the 19th century; much more different than Neandertals and ancient Egyptians. We will come to understand how different as more data is published from this genome.

There are so many fascinating aspects to this story, but one number stands above all. For about 40,000 years humans lived in Australia, and, as best we can tell, they didn't change. They were much like the humans who lived in Georgian caves for 30,000 years, but they lived into the modern era.

Forty thousand years.

Ten years ago we didn't have iPhones. Within two hundred years we will likely create artificial minds. In the unlikely event that we have heirs in 42,000 ACE they will be completely alien.

Forty thousand years, as ice came and went and oceans rose and fell.

If all other humans had died out, how long would they have lasted there unchanging? With a population of about 500,000 hunter gatherers over a vast territory they would not fall to disease. They faced no real predator threats. They had adjusted to radical climate change. Eventually some mass extinction event, a meteor or supervolcano, would end them -- but perhaps not for hundreds of thousands of years ...

The history of post-neolithic humanity in 10 minutes - DeLong's annual Econ 1 post

Brad DeLong, my favorite economist, has published the latest edition of his annual Econ 1 Berkeley: September 29 2010 Economic Growth Lecture. It's his gift to the rest of us, and a fine gift it is [1]. This is why I love blogs.

In about ten minutes anyone can catch up on the most current synthesis of the past 12,000 years of human history; from the deep history of the Neolithic to modern IT and the rise of India and China. He stops just short of putting IT on the same level as the development of language -- too soon to tell.

That leaves unspoken the period from about 150,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE and especially 30,000 to 12,000 BCE. This is deep history, and 2010 has been a breathtaking exploration of the pre-neolithic. In just the last eight months we've learned we moderns are a mongrel mix of Denisovan, Neandertal and, probably a lot of other pre-neolithic human "breeds". Out of that churning mix came something astonishing, horrifying, and (we currently believe) completely new to the earth - the technocentric animal.

Exciting times.

See also:

• The Denisova genome FAQ | john hawks weblog (Dec 2010)
• Denisovans: Ordinary humans with extraordinary genes? | The Loom | Discover Magazine (Dec 2010)
• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Is the Denisova mtDNA sequence modern? (Dec 2010)
• NEANDERTALS LIVE! | john hawks weblog (May 2010)
• After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC (9780674019997): Steven Mithen: Books (2006, now rather dated! It's on my read shelf via Steve M)
• On Deep History and the Brain (9780520252899): Daniel Lord Smail: Books (2007, Charlie Stross recommends this, I've not read it. I ordered a used copy for $6 including shipping)
• It's made out of meat. - Charlie's Diary - the spamularity comes next (Dec 2010). Incidentally, Scott Adams did a Dilbert cartoon on the spamularity about 8 years ago ...

Some of my stuff

• 50 million Neandertals living today
• Wolf and dog, Neandertal and human, and the limits of taxonomy
• Neandertal is us: the meaning of species
• How quickly can humans evolve?

[1] The next time I'm out SF way, I'm going to see if there's some way to sneak into a DeLong lecture. Maybe he sells tickets?

How quickly can humans evolve?

Even fifteen years ago cognitive science courses taught that the human mind was frozen in the Paleolithic Pleistocene. Humans didn’t evolve any more

Now we wonder how fast can humans evolve ...

Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution – Nicholas Wade - NYTimes.com

…. Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans…

This is vicious selection; in pre-technological times the infant mortality gap was probably even greater.

Which reminds me of something I wrote two months ago …

… Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?

What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal…

Six thousand years is twice the time it took humans to adapt to the Tibetan plateaus. So that’s plenty of time for brains to change.

Except brains are qualitatively different from red cells. Brains are a platform for minds. Left handed people flip hemispheric specializations, and yet seem to think very much like right handed people.

Think about that. Mutations that flip cardiac orientation are 100% lethal. Flipping hemispheres though – the mind adapts. People born with half a brain can function in human society. Five percent of the population have big ugly looking mutations in brain development systems – yet they seem fine.

The human mind can run similarly on a diverse infrastructure. The software analogy is irresistible. A browser running on an iPhone can look and act a lot like one running on a Win 7 box – but the two systems are very different.

This gives a lot more leeway to evolution. It means that the ‘variation controls’ on the genetic programs for neural development can be “set” (by evolution) to “high variation” – and we can still turn out functioning humans minds. It means that brains may be evolving very quickly – over the course of a thousands of years.

It will be interesting to compare the DNA of Homo sapiens 2000 BCE with Homo sapiens 2010 ACE.

See also

• The evolution of the human brain- ASPM, microcephalin and FOXP2 (2005)
• Human evolution- a pillar falls (2007)
• The evolutionary wonder of reading – hints from intracranial electrophysiology (2009)
• Is schizophrenia the price we pay for an evolving brain? (2007)
• Schizophrenia and autism- evolutionary disorders? (2007)
• Structural variation in the human genome and its r... [Annu Rev Med. 2010]
• The new history is deep history (2010)
• What if we could see the diversity of minds? (2008)
• What is schizophrenia- Not what we thought (2008)

Update 7/20/2010: John Hawks reviews the evidence for active selection. I think when he talks about "demographics" he might be talking about how the unification of dispersed human populations causes new phenotypes to emerge -- but he's tip-toeing around something and is being cryptic.

50 million Neandertals living today

Or 50 million Neandertal equivalents ....

NEANDERTALS LIVE! | john (Neandertal) hawks weblog

... In genetic terms, we can ask, how many times has the average Neandertal-derived gene been replicated in our present gene pool? Those aren't Neandertal individuals -- that is, a forensic anthropologist wouldn't classify them as Neandertals. They're the genetic equivalent.

The answer to this is also simple: In absolute terms, the Neandertals are here around us, yawping from the rooftops.

There are more than five billion people living outside of Africa today. If they are one percent Neandertal, that's the genetic equivalent of fifty million Neandertals walking the Earth around us.

Does that sound minor? If I told you that your average gene would be replicated into fifty million copies in the future, would you be satisfied? Maybe your ambition is greater, but I think the Neandertals have done very well for themselves.

Does this mean that Neandertals belong in our species, Homo sapiens?

Yes.

Interbreeding with fertile offspring in nature. That's the biological species concept.

Dogs look a lot more diverse than modern humans and neandertal humans, and they interbreed happily. We are one with Neandertal. Tell the BBC, Walking with Cavemen needs an epilogue.

Hawks has written a long, excited, essay with the occasional sentence fragments. He's probably been hitting the champagne. Today's Nature articles on the Neandertal genome are a validation of his research and his enthusiasms.

There's more (emphases mine).

... Burbano and colleagues put together a microarray including all the amino acid changes inferred to have happened on the human lineage. They used this to genotype the Neandertal DNA, and show that out of more than 10,000 amino acid changes that happened in human evolution, only 88 of them are shared by humans today but not present in the Neandertals.

That's amazingly few.

Green and colleagues did a similar exercise, except they went looking for "selective sweeps" in the ancestors of today's' humans. ... They identify 212 regions that seem to be new selected genes present in humans and not in Neandertals. This number is probably fairly close to the real number of selected changes in the ancestry of modern humans, because it includes non-coding changes that might have been selected.

Again, that's really a small number. We have roughly 200,000-300,000 years for these to have occurred on the human lineage -- after the inferred population divergence with Neandertals, but early enough that one of these selected genes could reach fixation in the expanding and dispersing human population. That makes roughly one selected substitution per 1000 years.

Which is more or less the rate that we infer by comparing humans and chimpanzees. What this means is simple: The origin of modern humans was nothing special, in adaptive terms. To the extent that we can see adaptive genetic changes, they happened at the basic long-term rate that they happened during the rest of our evolution.

Now from my perspective, this means something even more interesting. In our earlier work, we inferred a recent acceleration of human evolution from living human populations. That is a measure of the number of new selected mutations that have arisen very recently, within the last 40,000 years. And most of those happened within the past 10,000 years.

In that short time period, more than a couple thousand selected changes arose in the different human populations we surveyed. We demonstrated that this was a genuine acceleration, because it is much higher than the rate that could have occurred across human evolution, from the human-chimpanzee ancestor.

What we now know is that this is a genuine acceleration compared to the evolution of modern humans, within the last couple hundred thousand years.

Our recent evolution, after the dispersal of human populations across the world, was much faster than the evolution of Late Pleistocene populations. In adaptive terms, it is really true -- we're more different from early "modern" humans today, than they were from Neandertals. Possibly many times more different.

Now take a look at my recent post on deep history...

... Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?...

Why do we go from steam engines to iPads in a few human lifespans? Why do we have so much schizophrenia and autism? Our brains have been rewired at top speed; accidents are common.

A big day in science, a big day for Darwin, a bad day for creationists. The Neandertals, of course, must have had souls ...

Update: More from Carl Zimmer. When I wrote the above sentence about autism and schizophrenia, much less the original post some years ago, I didn't know this ...

If you believe the difference between humans and Neanderthals is primarily in the way we think, then you may be intrigued by the strongly selected genes that have been linked to the brain. These genes got their links to the brain thanks to the mental disorders that they can help produce when they mutate. For exampe, one gene, called AUTS2, gets its name from its link to autism. Another strongly-selected human gene, NRG3, has been linked to schizophrenia...

So the brain changes that occurred after Neandertal, in the time of deep history, have associations with the disorder of schizophrenia and autism.

In 2007 I wrote: Is schizophrenia the price we pay for an evolving brain? and I speculated that we could consider autism and schizophrenia to be "evolutionary disorders".

Update 10/6/2010: Clearly prescient: Your Mother Was a Neanderthal #4 (Time Warp Trio). Also, Robert Sawyer must be feeling cheerful today. Lastly, do read the whole Hawks essay. There were a lot of hominin-variants roaming the world 50,000 years ago, and they were likely "dynamic" (or at least - kinetic). We need a word with less historic baggage than "breed" to replace "species" in this discussion.

Update 10/7/2010: The Economist has a good summary, with more on what I've been calling evolutionary disorders.

... But an examination of the 20 largest regions that have evolved in this way shows that they include several genes associated with cognitive ability—and whose malfunction causes serious mental problems. The presence of an extra copy of DYRK1A is linked to Down’s syndrome; mutation of NRG3 is linked to schizophrenia; mutations of CADPS2 and AUTS2 are linked to autism. These four genes therefore look like good places to start the search for modern humanity’s essence...

Incidentally, I did a google search on "evolutionary disorders" and the term has been in use for a year or two. I had the earliest hit I saw though!

Zimmer's article has the clearest overview so far, with a balanced review of the scientific debates.

The new history is deep history

When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curie and we imagine everything changed overnight.

Most science, however, develops in bits and pieces, twisting and turning, waxing and waning, until, after thirty years, things are new. Even the dramatic shifts, like natural selection, took decades to get from radical to mainstream.

If you’re at all curious about things, you notice this in a single lifespan. Consider deep history; the story of humans from 150K to 3K years ago. In the past 30 years discoveries from genomics, climate research, linguistics, plant research, translation, anthropology and archaeology, combined with the revision of old biases, have dramatically changed our understanding of deep history. In each case, of course, computation has been a fundamental driver. That’s how it works – new instruments make new science.

It’s been growing slowly from all directions, but the sum is a very different world from what some of us learned in the 1970s. The human brain is evolving and changing far more dramatically than we imagined, and that evolution has not slowed with modernity. Our concepts of human speciation are being transformed; there were many “species” of human coexisting into deep history – and, like dogs and wolves, they probably crossed often.

Pre-agricultural humans were far more populous and widespread than we once imagined; the large populations of pre-invasion (early agricultural and hunter-gatherer) North America probably reflect worldwide pre-agricultural patterns.

Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?

What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have. They seem more … Neandertal.

Fascinating times, and there’s much more here than I can address in one post. That’s why I’m adding a new tag (label) for this blog -- “deep history” in anticipation of much more to come.

For now see also:

• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog- Paleolithic flax fibres from Georgia (Kvavadze et al. 2009)
• Multiregional evolution lives! - john hawks weblog
• Why Humanity Loves, and Needs, Cities - Economix Blog - NYTimes.
• In Our Time, Babylon
• In Our Time, Akhenaten (He reminds me of Kim Jong-il)
• In Our Time, The Library at Nineveh
  

Update: What does the Antikythera mechanism teach us about deep history? It cannot be the only anomaly of its kind in all time.

Update 8/21/2010: Brad DeLong says I don't pay enough attention to the fragility of culture and technology without writing and location persistence.

Dogs enabled human civilization?

A NYT science writer suggests that dogs domesticated a notoriously viscious primate:

Nicholas Wade's book "Before the Dawn" - From Genghis Khan To Donor 401:

... Maybe the best news in the book is the finding that dogs were essential to the creation of modern civilization. If human beings were to cease being nomads, they had to be secure when they settled down. (After all, enemies would always know where to find them.) Dogs became trusty sentinels, which is why they, and not the wolves from which they descended, bark. It was a trait early man valued and probably selected for. The question remains, though: Did man domesticate the dog or did dogs figure out what man wanted and do the job themselves? Anyone who has ever owned a dog instinctively knows the answer.

Hmmph. I wrote previously:

Sometime I must write about my not- entirely-in-fun theory that dogs created civilization by allowing women and geeks to defend themselves against the alpha male.

My theory, heretofore passed on verbally only to my spouse and long suffering friends, was that civilization required geeks and women to ally against the muscle-bound alpha males. Problem is, how do you go up against someone that can rip you apart? One technique is to ally with a sharp toothed friend. Why do you think single women walk with furry partners?

Early Voices: The Leap to Language

Early Voices: The Leap to Language

NYT article on the 50K leap, the mutation that enabled fluent verbal communications.