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Thanks. I didn't realize anthropologists thought that so many human habits and inventions developed so recently. It appears there is some debate about whether t

• simonh 4y ago
  It’s true the physical evidence for some of this is fairly spotty because natural materials degrade or disperse, but I think the basic outline is sound. It’s also true the middle Palaeolithic in the region of some 300k years ago represented quite a significant advance in stone tool technology, but material culture was still very elementary for a huge span of time after that. The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture. https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-14656/ https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-... The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years. I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.