I’ve been developing a bunch of unorthodox theories here, and at times I can start to wonder if I’m just letting my imagination run away with me, so it’s nice to get occasional confirmation that I’m on the right track. Case in point: an article the other day summarizing a paper by archaeologist John Shea, who argues that there is no significant biological difference between the earliest modern humans of 200,000 years ago and their more recent descendants, including ourselves.
“For decades anthropologists contrasted these earlier ‘archaic’ African and Asian humans with their ‘behaviorally-modern’ Upper Paleolithic counterparts,” the article notes, “explaining the differences between them in terms of a single ‘Human Revolution’ that fundamentally changed human biology and behavior. … Shea argues that comparing the behavior of our most ancient ancestors to Upper Paleolithic Europeans holistically and ranking them in terms of their ‘behavioral modernity’ is a waste of time. There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability.”
As anyone who’s been following this blog may have noticed, I’ve arrived at much the same conclusion over the last year, as it’s become apparent to me that my chronology for the sequence of visions requires the earliest visions to go back to the dawn of modern humanity.
But even though it’s nice to see someone else rejecting the old Eurocentric delusion that the important part of human history began only when modern humans arrived in Europe, I’d still take exception to Shea’s reductionist notion that all we’re seeing over the last 200,000 years is “behavioral variability” involving “the varying costs and benefits of different toolmaking strategies.”
The human knowledge base has expanded enormously over that period, art and technology have grown increasingly complex, and the pace of change has constantly accelerated. A theory like Shea’s which describes history as essentially flat has to be omitting something vital.