
Early humans domesticated themselves, new genetic evidence suggests - bookofjoe
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/early-humans-domesticated-themselves-new-genetic-evidence-suggests
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tabtab
It seems there was a tipping point in human evolution where trade and
negotiation grew more beneficial to a given tribe (or group of tribes) than
attempting to kill all your competition through war. You could get the best
arrowhead stones without hiking hundreds of miles, for example. Art and
culture relatively suddenly spiked roughly around 50,000 years ago.
Neanderthals arguably had a bigger brain. It's not raw intelligence that set
us apart, it was leveraging social networks (the analog type).

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dr_dshiv
This is in the 600,000 years ago range, though, versus the 50k associated with
language

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tabtab
Most of the evidence is that wide-spread trade and art relatively suddenly
"popped up" around 50k years ago.

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dr_dshiv
A few speculative hypotheses for consideration:

1\. _Ultraviolence_ : An extremely violent cultural ritual developed that
resulted in a much higher rate of fatality for participants. Then, the
genetically predisposed to warlike behaviour would be killed off
systematically before breeding. This would have the additional effect of
clearing outgroup humanoids in the area.

2\. _Gender Roles_ : Male sexual selection for females focused on cooperation
attributes -- or aesthetic attributes like the facial ones associated in the
paper.

3\. _Cooperative warfare_ : Cooperative traits allowed for better outgroup
warfare

4\. _BBQ Theory of Human Evolution_ : Cooperative traits allowed for better
big-game hunting. Mammoth barbecues attracted mating prospects from large
areas, resulting in the rapid sexual-selection effect of amplifying
cooperative genes

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hans05
Possibly the change could have coincided with humans learning to use weapons
regularly during combat. This would have made violence much more deadly and
potentially resulted in more violent individuals dying off early.

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barberousse
"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of
all." \-- Friedrich Nietzsche

