I think most of us have a real difficulty appreciating the possibile events that humans can experience over 100,000 years. For any population, there were abundant chances of "perfect storms" of climate change, conflict with other populations, and -- indeed -- perfect storms. Even very rare events can occur many times over several hundred thousand years.
Both American continents were populated in less than 20,000 years. The Pacific islands were populated in much less time. There would have been many failures in trial-and-error that do not leave any traces.
This is a long way to say that the actual story is much more complicated than was described a few decades ago. Time and space were both very big, with lots of possibilities.
On the other hand, it also is difficult to understand why there were so few technological changes in the physical record over the millennia. Of course, we know little about wooden and fabric technology, and of the people who were not living in caves.
We look forward to the ongoing research and the rich complexity of our ancestors.
Thanks for this comment! A way of looking at the odds is that success is a long tail distribution with a few favorable events and circumstances making a lot of difference on the timescale of millennia.
The flip side of this is the most of the individuals and circumstances that archaeologists happen to find are unlikely to be these massive successes. Most of our sites come from people who succeeded in modest terms, who would have been entirely typical of their time, but who were ultimately doomed.
Their strategies were locally optimized, certainly to the extent they could plan them. Yet some few groups, maybe far away, were climbing higher adaptive peaks that would propel their descendants ahead of the average, exponential growth doing its inevitable thing.
Genetics traces the latter events, while archaeology mostly traces the former, and as you note this is a challenge of timescales.
One idea I like (sorry, no attribution) is that in Asia the use of bamboo might have driven cultural development differently from that in bamboo-deficient Europe. Perhaps microscopic analysis of Denisovan tools could reveal bamboo-specific use.
I think most of us have a real difficulty appreciating the possibile events that humans can experience over 100,000 years. For any population, there were abundant chances of "perfect storms" of climate change, conflict with other populations, and -- indeed -- perfect storms. Even very rare events can occur many times over several hundred thousand years.
Both American continents were populated in less than 20,000 years. The Pacific islands were populated in much less time. There would have been many failures in trial-and-error that do not leave any traces.
This is a long way to say that the actual story is much more complicated than was described a few decades ago. Time and space were both very big, with lots of possibilities.
On the other hand, it also is difficult to understand why there were so few technological changes in the physical record over the millennia. Of course, we know little about wooden and fabric technology, and of the people who were not living in caves.
We look forward to the ongoing research and the rich complexity of our ancestors.
Thanks for this comment! A way of looking at the odds is that success is a long tail distribution with a few favorable events and circumstances making a lot of difference on the timescale of millennia.
The flip side of this is the most of the individuals and circumstances that archaeologists happen to find are unlikely to be these massive successes. Most of our sites come from people who succeeded in modest terms, who would have been entirely typical of their time, but who were ultimately doomed.
Their strategies were locally optimized, certainly to the extent they could plan them. Yet some few groups, maybe far away, were climbing higher adaptive peaks that would propel their descendants ahead of the average, exponential growth doing its inevitable thing.
Genetics traces the latter events, while archaeology mostly traces the former, and as you note this is a challenge of timescales.
One idea I like (sorry, no attribution) is that in Asia the use of bamboo might have driven cultural development differently from that in bamboo-deficient Europe. Perhaps microscopic analysis of Denisovan tools could reveal bamboo-specific use.
I recently attended a great talk about the bamboo idea by a couple of good colleagues, and I am hoping they will publish their ideas.