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Originally Posted by abaya
What kind of anthropologists have you been talking to?? Citation needed, por favor.
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If "behaviourly modern" humans evolved 50,000 years ago, why did it take so long for this modernity to be put into practice? Renfrew calls this gap the "sapient paradox".
One possiblity is that some evolutionary adaptation had first to occur in human social behaviour. The adaptation, probably mediated by a suite of genetic changes, would have been new behaviours, perhaps ones that made people readier to live together in larger groups, to coexist without constant fighting and to accept the imposition of ... hierarchy. This first change, of lesser agressiveness, would have created the novel environment of a settled society, which in turn prompted a sequence of further adaptations, including perhaps the different set of intellectual capacities that is rewarded by the institution of property.
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From
Before the Dawn, by Nicholas Wade.
Further, and here Wade quotes Allan Johnson and Timothy Earle from the
Evolution of Human Societies:
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Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years, and it may well be that these transformations were accompanied by evolutionary as well as cultural changes. It was only after people had become less violent that they were able to abandon the nomadic life of hunting and gathering that they had followed for the last 5 million years, and began to settle down.
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Further, an examination of hunter-gatherer societies in such diverse regions as New Guinea, Africa and South America shows just how violent these societies can be. Richard Borshay Lee in his book
The !Kung San finds that the murder rate amongst the !Kung is 3 times that of the United States, easily the most murderous of Western nations.