The Problem of Cognitive Modernity
The View from Oregon — 307: Friday 20 September 2024
Why do different ethnic groups have different worldviews and build different social institutions and different civilizations on the basis of these different social institutions? Wouldn’t common human evolutionary psychology suggest similar worldviews and institutions? What are the limits of similarity? How similar would two worldviews need to be in order to be considered similar? I’m going to take up this question entirely within the context of my own thought, arguing with myself, as it were, because the conclusion of last week’s newsletter suggested to me an alternative to, or a permutation of, an idea that I had worked out a few years ago in 2015.
Given my understanding of civilization, civilizations are institutionally isomorphic, so it could be argued that even the civilizational traditions that can be traced back to distinct pristine civilizations are still institutionally isomorphic, and I would be willing assert this, but I would also assert that this is a low resolution perspective on civilization, and our grasp of a civilization is usually high resolution, or, rather, even when vague it includes some high resolution constituents. A distinctive work of art or architecture, for example, is a high resolution constituent of our grasp of a given civilization. So if we think of the Mogul civilization of India (or, if you prefer, the Mogul period of Indian civilization), we may think of the Taj Mahal almost as a symbol or an exemplar of that civilization, and that gives us a high resolution example of the low resolution idea that civilizations produce works of monumental architecture. Monumental architecture can be as different as the pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the Taj Mahal, and the Sydney Opera House. I could also cite wooden monumental architecture like Nijō Castle and Sanjūsangen-dō temple, both in Kyoto, or the stave churches of Norway.
Let me give a more specific example. China is geographically isolated due to mountains, deserts, and the Pacific Ocean. The earliest known agricultural settlements, presumably the pristine ancestor of Chinese civilization, are to be found in the Yellow River Valley. However, there are other cultural complexes in China. The archaeological finds unearthed at Sanxingdui since 1986 have revealed a culture distinct from the core civilizational culture of the Yellow River Valley. The Sanxingdui culture dates from about the 12th century BC, so it is already several thousand years downstream from the Neolithic, when we would suppose that, if there had been multiple independent origins of civilizations in China, they would have gotten their start. It is not clear whether the Sanxingdui culture is a descendant from earlier idea diffusion or was the result of independent invention, but during those several thousand years between the Neolithic and the 12th century BC, we can suppose that these cultures interacted with each other through long distance trade, which would have involved idea diffusion, including the diffusion of artistic styles.
When I, as a Westerner, look at pictures of artifacts from the Sanxingdui culture, these strike me as distinctively Chinese, that is to say, they are distinct from the artifacts of the core culture of Chinese civilization, but still recognizably Chinese. (Unfortunately, I have not traveled to China or seen any of these artifacts with my own eyes, which might well change my view of them.) This can be explained by multiregional cognitive modernity. If the geographical region of east Asia experienced independent cognitive modernity, this would have occurred thousands of years, probably tens of thousands of years, before any of the Neolithic cultures of China. All of these cultures, including those that developed later, after the Neolithic, like the Sanxingdui culture, would have followed from the same geographically regional cognitive modernity.
To make this make sense requires a little background. The purest out-of-Africa models have been watered down a bit in recent years by a growing willingness to recognize a multiplicity of hominid species, likely exhibiting reticulate evolution, meaning that distinct populations that have already grown apart enough to be considered distinct species are still (at least partially) fertile with each other, so it is primarily social and geographical factors that limit the inter-breeding of these populations. Inter-breeding, while increasingly rare, will occasionally take place, and this means the distinctive genes of the populations mix. This has now been well documented in regard to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe, but it likely took place with other populations in other parts of the world.
Because human beings were the first species to use technology to facilitate their distribution on a planetary scale, the possibilities of reticulate evolution following from the tension between geographical isolation and human wanderlust will be more complex than for any other species, with the possible exception of bird species that migrate on a planetary scale. Human populations can be highly mobile or confined with a given geographical region, even when still hunter-gatherers. A correspondent recently pointed me to the paper “Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia” by Ray Tobler, et al. (lots of co-authors). Obviously, the ancestors of the Australian aborigines had to travel a long distance to get to Australia, but, once in Australia, and once having achieved “continent-wide colonization” (in the language of the paper), they settled into a regime of regionalism that endured literally for tens of thousands of years — much longer than the history of any civilization.
There is a sense in which we could call such populations “settled,” but I think it would be better to retain that term for peoples who live in settlements, and call those populations that hunt and gather within a geographical region “regional.” We don’t have to necessarily identify settlement with agriculture, although that is what drives most long-term settlement. The native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, now the Pacific coast of Canada, had access to sufficiently rich fisheries that they were able to live in settled villages without agriculture, and so could be called “fisher-gatherers” though I’ve never seen anyone use that term. In many parts of the world, pastoral peoples move between summer and winter pastures, and many peoples engaged in this transhumance lifeway return to the same campgrounds year after year, and generation after generation. This is not so different from peoples who engage in intensive gathering prior to formal agriculture, so that we can see the process of convergence on settlement as a gradual one that can be reached by more than one path, and which probably passes through several stages.
The resulting patchwork of human populations (and, before that, multiple hominid species) in various stages of nomadism and settlement would contribute to the complexity of the gene flow among these populations, some of which might remain largely closed to other populations, some of which, living in well-trodden areas, might experience many nomadic groups passing through, and some populations remaining entirely nomadic and being the ones who do the passing through. All of this is to say that while the basic human stock evolved in Africa, we have also learned that hominids evolved elsewhere (from earlier migrations out of Africa), and that these many human populations varied in their degree of gene flow with other populations. The basic picture of out of Africa holds, but it frays around the edges, and the devil is in the details.
For a time, the main rival to the out of Africa theory of human origins was the multi-regional hypothesis, which held that anatomically modern human beings evolved in distinct geographical regions. The problem with this is that it never happens in the evolution of any species. If there are strong convergent evolutionary selection pressures you might see something like this, but with human beings living in many distinct biomes, they were not subject to the same selection pressures (other than universal selection pressures like gravity). The incipient speciation that human races represent — a process begun by geographical isolation and arrested by transportation technologies — is the result of adaptation to local conditions driven by geographically local selection pressures. However, while anatomically modern human beings came out of Africa (and were slightly modified by gene flow from populations with which they intermixed, which had evolved slightly in the meantime, but not enough to make mating infertile), one could still maintain that the threshold of cognitive modernity (as distinct from anatomical modernity) did evolve on a multi-regional basis.
Some reject the very idea of cognitive modernity as a threshold in human evolution. If you do, then the conversation ends there. If, on the other hand, you recognize that somewhere about 50,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 years, human life became more complex, especially in regard to the use of symbols and the appearance of art and music, then cognitive modernity is a thing. Since we now have evidence that Homo sapiens reached Asia by at least 80,000 years before present, and maybe by as much as 120,000 years before present, that means that cognitive modernity appeared separately in geographically isolated populations. This, in turn, would explain the differences in worldview and civilization among geographically isolated populations. As I noted above, the pure form of the out of Africa hypothesis had to be modified in the light of later evidence, and the picture is a little more complex as a result. So too with any hypothesis that intends to explain the complexity of human culture: a big picture view of the process is just a sketch, and there will always be more evidence that will entail changes to the details of the picture. The thing about a sketch is that it is, by definition, short on detail, so a sketch can be consistent with any number of subsequent hypotheses that seek to fill in the details.
Now I am in a position to complexify my own multiregional cognitive modernity hypothesis. In last week’s newsletter I concluded with the idea that, “…two populations of the same mind subject to distinct directional selection in the form of reflective disequilibrium, will diverge and ultimately mind will speciate.” So the question for me becomes whether the human mind that results from cognitive modernity appeared earlier, before the planetary distribution of our species, and then this mind itself speciated in the process of being subjected to a multiplicity of selection pressures, or whether the process of cognitive modernity appeared later, multiregionally. The complexification of the multiregional cognitive modernity hypothesis suggests that it might be a little of both. Cognitive modernity could consist of a number of thresholds, perhaps even differently organized in sequence in different populations. For example, a given population might develop music ten thousand years before developing visual arts, or vice versa. This would be a period of time sufficient for the distinctive cultural process to become a directional selection pressure. Those populations that first experienced cognitive modernity through more complex technology, or through music, or through cave paintings, would have a distinct experience of human cognition, with the initial experience of cognitive modernity being a selection pressure on later cognitive development.
I could also hypothesize that there is a core cognitive modernity that occurred in early Homo sapiens while still in Africa (those who cite the Blombos cave artifacts as indicative of symbolism and art sometimes take these to be evidence of cognitive modernity), which was then later modified by further rungs on the ladder of cognitive modernity attained after the out of Africa diaspora. If one posits a sufficient number of episodes of cognitive modernity it ceases to be a threshold and instead is a continuous process, but this continuous process might begin in one place, and, as that original population fans out across the planet, the process continues, but it continues differently in different regions.
