
Rethinking "out Of Africa" - vectorbunny
http://www.edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa
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dredmorbius
Fascinating in multiple dimensions.

The growth in tools and analytic capability available to anthropologists over
the past 4-5 decades is staggering, and discussed in detail.

Our understanding of the emergence and migrations of early and proto-humans
through the world, similarly. Our species as a whole is roughly 2.5Ma, roughly
67,000 generations old -- that's 67,000 iterated games of development,
divergence, and selection. With the primary homo sapiens African diaspora
occuring 60,000 years ago, we're looking at 2000 generations. You might want
to double those values as I'm using the contemporary "1 generation = 30 years"
metric, but it's still an astoundingly brief period of time. History begins
6,000 years ago and takes off like fire spreading from Mesopotamia across
Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and again in Central America.

The history of emergences, die-offs, re-breedings, and re-encounters is also
telling. There's no reason to think that humans have ceased evolving (though
we have no island populations to allow isolated development, I'm reminded of
William Gibson's recent _Wired_ interview on post-punk Internet-mediated
social trends). Or that drastic environmental or resource changes couldn't
have profound impacts on civilisation.

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dredmorbius
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