Refuting a Myth About Human Origins | Hacker News Reader

Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

americanscientist.org

29 pointsrobg10 comments

The online print version of American Scientist articles looks amazing.

can we get a tl;dr version?

From the article: "But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to 'behavioral modernity' in our species’ recent past."

I hope this helps. The article is quite interesting, and well worth a full-length read.

Ah, or as hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy put it, our digital watches don't make us special.

Or, if you prefer, we're still feces flinging monkees.

I would be interested to know where the borders lie between being intrigued enough to follow the link and being repulsed by a certain threshold of text, yet still being attracted enough to the subject ask someone to reduce it to a quote ...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nation-shudders-at-large-bl...

hehehe guilty as charged.

Sometimes the conclusion of an idea is interesting, but a lengthy exposition of how that conclusion was arrived at is less so.

well, it is many pages, and from the first several paragraphs, which I did read, it resisted summation. So I came back here. I also saved it to instapaper in case your answer was sufficiently interesting to warrant a full read.

(I admit that I try to make summations reading backwards, starting with the last paragraphs)

Statement: The common belief that the modern homo sapiens evolved from an archaic homo sapiens during a revolutionary step in evolution. Study of flintstones produceed during a long timeframe show consistent variations in sophistication and nothing hints at a 2001-space-odyssee-black-monolith moment.

"... stop looking at artifacts as expressions of evolutionary states and start looking at them as byproducts of behavioral strategies"

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