Behavioral modernity is a term used in
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, archeology and
sociologySociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
to refer to a set of traits that distinguish present day
humanHumans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
s and their recent ancestors from both living
primateA primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...
s and other extinct hominid lineages. It is the point at which
Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a reliance on
symbolic thoughtAbstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
and to express cultural creativity. These developments are often thought to be associated with the
origin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
.
There are two main theories regarding when modern human behavior emerged. One theory holds that behavioral modernity occurred as a sudden event some 50 kya (50,000 years ago) in
prehistoryPrehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
, possibly as a result of a major genetic mutation or as a result of a biological reorganization of the brain that led to the emergence of modern human
natural languageIn the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
s. Proponents of this theory refer to this event as the
Great Leap Forward or the
Upper Paleolithic Revolution.
The second theory holds that there was never any single technological or cognitive revolution. Proponents of this view argue that modern human behavior is the result of the gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills and culture occurring over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Proponents of this view include
Stephen OppenheimerStephen Oppenheimer is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a member of Green Templeton College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and carries out and publishes research in the fields of genetics and human prehistory.-Career:Oppenheimer...
in his book
Out of Eden, and
John SkoylesJohn Skoyles is a dyslexic neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist. He initially studied philosophy of science at the London School of Economics and then did MRC funded research upon neuroscience and dyslexia at University College London....
and
Dorion SaganDorion Sagan is an American science writer, essayist, and theorist. He has written and co-authored many books on culture, evolution, and the history and philosophy of science, most recently "The Sciences of Avatar: from Anthropology to Xenology" and "Death and Sex," which won first place at the...
in their book
Up from Dragons: The evolution of human intelligenceUp from Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence is a 2002 book on human evolution, the human brain, and the origins of human cognition by John Skoyles and Dorion Sagan. The book considers how the brain and genes evolved into their present condition over the course of thousands and millions of...
.
Definition
Modern human behavior is observed in cultural universals which are the key elements shared by all groups of people throughout the history of humanity. Examples of elements that may be considered cultural universals are
languageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
,
religionReligion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
,
artArt is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
,
musicMusic is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
,
mythThe term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
,
cookingCooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...
,
gameA game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...
s, and jokes. While some of these traits distinguish
Homo sapiens from other species in their degree of articulation in language based culture, some have analogues in
animal ethologyEthology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
. Since cultural universals are found in all cultures including some of the most isolated indigenous groups, scientists believe that these traits must have evolved or have been invented in
AfricaAfrica is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
prior to the exodus.
Classic archaeologically-accessible evidence of behavioral modernity includes:
- finely-made tools
A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric, particularly Stone Age cultures that have become extinct...
- fishing
- evidence of long-distance exchange or barter among groups
- systematic use of pigment
A pigment is a material that changes the color of reflected or transmitted light as the result of wavelength-selective absorption. This physical process differs from fluorescence, phosphorescence, and other forms of luminescence, in which a material emits light.Many materials selectively absorb...
(such as ochreOchre is the term for both a golden-yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as "red ochre". The more rarely used terms "purple ochre" and "brown ochre" also exist for variant hues...
) and jewelry for decoration or self-ornamentation
- figurative art
The art of the Upper Paleolithic is the oldest undisputed prehistoric art, originating in the Aurignacian archaeological culture of Europe and the Levant some 40,000 years ago, and continues to the Mesolithic about 12,000 years ago...
(cave paintingCave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, and the term is used especially for those dating to prehistoric times. The earliest European cave paintings date to the Aurignacian, some 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known...
s, petroglyphPetroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s, figurinesVenus figurines is an umbrella term for a number of prehistoric statuettes of women portrayed with similar physical attributes from the Upper Palaeolithic, mostly found in Europe, but with finds as far east as Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, extending their distribution to much of Eurasia, from the...
)
- game playing and music
Prehistoric music is a term in the history of music for all music produced in preliterate cultures , beginning somewhere in very late geological history...
- foods being cooked and seasoned instead of being consumed in the raw
- burial
A more terse definition of the evidence is the
behavioral B's: blades, beads, burials, bone toolmaking, and beauty.
Timing
Whether modern behavior emerged as a single event or gradually is the subject of vigorous debate.
Great leap forward
Advocates of this theory argue that the great leap forward occurred sometime between 50-40 kya in Africa or Europe. They argue that humans who lived before 50 kya were behaviorally
primitivePrimitive may refer to:* Anarcho-primitivism, an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization* Primitive culture, one that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity...
and indistinguishable from other extinct hominids such as the Neanderthals or Homo erectus. Proponents of this view base their evidence on the abundance of complex artifacts, such as artwork and bone tools of the Upper Paleolithic, that appear in the fossil record after 50 kya. They argue that such artifacts are absent from the fossil record from before 50 kya, indicating that earlier hominids lacked the cognitive skills required to produce such artifacts.
Jared DiamondJared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA...
states that humans of the
AcheuleanAcheulean is the name given to an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture associated with early humans during the Lower Palaeolithic era across Africa and much of West Asia, South Asia and Europe. Acheulean tools are typically found with Homo erectus remains...
and
MousterianMousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age.-Naming:...
cultures lived in an apparent stasis, experiencing little cultural change. This was followed by a sudden flowering of fine toolmaking, sophisticated weaponry, sculpture, cave painting, body ornaments, and long-distance trade. Humans also expanded into hitherto uninhabited environments, such as
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
and Northern
EurasiaEurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
.
The Great Leap Forward was concurrent with the extinction of the
NeanderthalThe Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
s, and it has been suggested that Cro-Magnon interaction with Neanderthals caused this extinction.
According to this model, the emergence of
anatomically modern humansThe term anatomically modern humans in paleoanthropology refers to early individuals of Homo sapiens with an appearance consistent with the range of phenotypes in modern humans....
predates the emergence of behaviorally modern humans by over 100 kya.
Continuity hypothesis
Proponents of the
continuity hypothesis hold that no single genetic or biological change is responsible for the appearance of modern behavior. They contend that modern human behavior is the result of
socioculturalSociocultural evolution is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have changed over time...
and sociobiological evolution occurring over hundreds of thousands of years.
Continuity theorists base their assertions on evidence of aspects of modern behavior that can be seen in the
Middle Stone AgeThe Middle Stone Age was a period of African Prehistory between Early Stone Age and Late Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50-25,000 years ago. The beginnings of particular MSA stone tools have their origins as far back as 550-500,000...
(approximately 250 - 50 kya) at a number of sites in Africa and the
LevantThe Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
. For example, a ritual burial with grave goods at Qafzeh is Middle Stone Age (MSA) having been dated to 90 kya. The usage of pigment is noted at several MSA sites in Africa dating back more than 100 kya.
Continuity theorists believe that what appears to be a technological revolution at the onset of the Upper Paleolithic is most likely a result of increased cultural exchange resulting from a growing human population. Some continuity theorists also argue that the rapid pace of cultural evolution during the Upper Paleolithic transition may have been triggered by adverse environmental conditions such as aridity arising from glacial maxima. They further dispute that anatomical modernity predates behavioral modernity, stating that changes in human anatomy and behavioral changes occurred stepwise. The findings of Curtis Marean and his colleagues of fishing and symbolic behavior dating to 164,000 years ago on the southern African coast strongly support this analysis.
See also
- Archaic Homo sapiens
Archaic Homo sapiens is a loosely defined term used to describe a number of varieties of Homo, as opposed to anatomically modern humans , in the period beginning 500,000 years ago....
- Bicameralism (psychology)
Bicameralism is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human brain once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind...
- Blombos Cave
Blombos Cave is a cave in a calcarenite limestone cliff on the Southern Cape coast in South Africa. It is an archaeological site made famous by the discovery of 75,000-year-old pieces of ochre engraved with abstract designs and beads made from Nassarius shells, and c. 80,000-year-old bone tools...
- Cultural universal
A cultural universal , as discussed by George Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Donald Brown and others, is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition...
- Enkapune Ya Muto
Enkapune Ya Muto, also known as Twilight Cave, is a Late Stone Age site on the Mau Escarpment of Kenya. Beads made of perforated ostrich egg shells found at the site have been dated to 40,000 years ago. The beads found at the site represent some of the earliest known personal ornaments.-External...
- Evolution of human intelligence
- Human evolution
Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...
- Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- Origin of music
- Paleolithic religion
Religious behaviour is thought to have emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest,but behavioral patterns such as burial rites that one might characterize as religious - or as ancestral to religious behaviour - reach back into the Middle Paleolithic, as early as 300,000...
- Recent African origin
- Richard Klein
- Sibudu Cave
Sibudu Cave is a cave in a sandstone cliff in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is an important Middle Stone Age site occupied, with some gaps, from 77,000 years ago to 38,000 years ago...
- Sociocultural evolution
Sociocultural evolution is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have changed over time...
- Symbolism (disambiguation)
Symbolism is the applied use of symbols. It is a representation that carries a particular meaning. It is a device in literature where an object represents an idea.A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself....
External links