> Around the time H. sapiens emerged two hundred thousand years ago, there were many other species in the genus, with Neanderthals endemic to western Eurasia, and Denisovans endemic to eastern Eurasia. The success of H. sapiens outside Africa, the fact that our species expanded out of Africa and Neanderthals and Denisovans did not expand into Africa, is well explained by this general hypothesis of the asymmetric advantage of the mother ship.
There's decent reasons to think that Neanderthals and Denisovan's were cold and altitude adapted, specifically, both genetically and culturally. The "altitude adaption" gene Tibetans enjoy that improves physical performance at altitude even with lower blood oxygen levels actually came from Denisovans. And Neanderthals are well known to be the most cold-adapted hominin (Ocobock 2021).
This argues against them having many (or any) advantages if coming back to the heat and predominantly lower altitudes of Africa (the Rift Valley and Ethiopian highlands excepted). I don't think this challenges your assymetric advantage theory at all, I'm just pointing to these as plausible mechanisms.
Also, both archaic H Sap and modern H Sap shared ranges with both Neanderthals and Denisovans for many hundreds of thousands of years (hence our genetic mixing), but got wiped out (like all the other hominins) in the final culturally modern out-migration from Africa roughly 50kya, after the Cognitive Revolution - they weren't just wiping out Neanderthals and Denisovans, they were also wiping out other, less culturally (and maybe immunologically) sophisticated H Saps.
The issue with this story is that there is no evidence for any Cognitive Revolution before the last out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens. The best that is available is Blombos cave. But that episode happened too early (90ka) and no one has been able to show that modern humans populations derive the the Cape population responsible for Blombos, although some have made a valiant, if unpersuasive, effort (Rito et al. 2019). The story within Africa is much more complicated than anyone expected. There is no support for either within-Africa multiregionalism or (what would've been much more satisfactory) a single source region.
We don't know what the correct story is. But the simple story of a Cognitive Revolution occurring within Africa, followed by dispersal out of Africa has been totally refuted. If that story were true, we would be able to track behaviorally modern populations as they disperse within and without Africa from archeological proxies (symbolic storage). But that's just not the case. Anatomically modern humans do not exhibit behavioral modernity until much later, and they do not do so everywhere at the same time. The picture won't clear up until what is happening within Africa in the lead up to the dispersal is clarified. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-puzzle-of-human-origins.
The climatic adaptation thesis against Europeans/Neanderthals applies just as much to Africans/Sapiens. For if the former were cold adapted, the latter were warm adapted. So, that cannot explain the asymmetry. And as mentioned before, nor can any behavioral advantage due to language/cognition.
If I'm understanding correctly, the Boas-Chomsky universal is something like the capacity for symbolic and abstract thought?
If so, I agree with you that this was almost certainly not part of the Cognitive Revolution and last outmigration, it was happening in us way before then, and arguably it was probably even true for Neanderthals.
I think we have at least *suggestive* evidence that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought, via carvings, ornamental beads, likely grave goods (flowers, goat horns, jawbones in graves), and sophisticated multi-step technologies like pitch glue for spear affixing.
Quoting from one of my posts:
"We do think they were just as intelligent as us, however. They had art - “fine blades, pigments, ornamental beads, engraved artwork.”
Neanderthals were capable of quite complex problems solving, as they made pitch to affix spear heads to spear shafts, and this requires “synthesizing pitch from birch bark via a multi-step process that relied on strict control of temperature and required a dry distillation excluding oxygen.”
But they never made sleds despite living primarily in cold places. They never made boats. They didn’t store food.
In terms of art quantity, fewer than ten ornamental beads worked by Neanderthals have been found in 200k years of rich archeology, compared with thousands from H Sap. Similar comparisons apply to stone blades, stylized figurines, ritualized burials, and engraved symbols. They had the skills, but used them more rarely and later than H Sap."
I agree that figuring out whatever is going on with the San divergence and inter-Africa lineage and cultural mixing will be really interesting. The most likely overall theory I've heard is something like the European dynamic which could be broadly summarized as: "a bunch of similar technological-level cultures warring and fermenting within Africa until somebody reached an optimal cultural package, and then those folk went out of Africa and wiped all the other hominins out."
> The climatic adaptation thesis against Europeans/Neanderthals applies just as much to Africans/Sapiens. For if the former were cold adapted, the latter were warm adapted. So, that cannot explain the asymmetry. And as mentioned before, nor can any behavioral advantage due to language/cognition.
Agree, but I think there's a pretty plausible answer here on why the asymmetry was easier the other way. The big advantage culturally modern H Saps had in that last outmigration was group size, due to domestication and being less reactively aggressive than archaic H Sap, Neanderthals, and (probably) Denisovans.
Neanderthal groups, for example, were typically the size of only 1 or 2 families of immediate relatives, consisting of 10-30 people.
Archaic H Sap, partway on the road to domestication, had groups of roughly 20-50 people.
Modern H Sap had groups of 20-100 people.
Higher reactive aggression tendencies really makes cooperation and collaboration harder. Those smaller Neanderthals group sizes also whacked them on genetic diversity, which was much lower than in H Sap.
So basically, culturally modern H Sap comes out with better weapons and larger group sizes and better cooperation and coordination, and can wipe out the much-more-impressive-physically Neanderthals. Then in terms of cold and mountains, you can just adapt to those culturally. I wrote a post about that theory here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-bullies-and-inadvertently#footnote-21-149332133
No need even to reach for biogeography. The political-geographic fragmentation of Europe produced political competition and hence, over several hundred years, military and technological ascendancy over the less internally-competitive Chinese and Ottoman empires.
China has had a larger population than Europe for a millennium. Clearly population level alone isn't determinative. But whether Western states have the political will to make up for (or even substantially mitigate) their demographic deficit now is unclear.
Read the Flicking piece from Bloomberg - & was disappointed to see it hadn’t at all engaged with the core of Pettis’s argument re China (& other trade surplus nations) … which is available on almost a daily basis in twitterX & BlueSky.
Waiting for someone to directly take on the thesis of ‘Trade Wars Are Class Wars’. JW Mason has certainly written dissenting views in this area.
The burden for the case against the theory of imbalances doing anything interesting is on economists, not journalists. Few have tried because everyone understands its a second order correction term that could not do the heavy lifting of deindustrializing the West even if it tried. In any case, the US had deindustrialized long before the China Shock.
This is not to say that no thesis in Trade Wars Are Class Wars is sustainable. It is true, that Pettis argues, that global imbalances are due to wage suppression (especially so in Germany, due to Hartz IV). But there is no evidence that China's high savings policy has hurt the US. The numbers just don't add up. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/notes-on-us-china-policy. Relatedly, the idea that global imbalances are responsible for financial instability is also wrong. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/proof-that-global-imbalances-did.
> Around the time H. sapiens emerged two hundred thousand years ago, there were many other species in the genus, with Neanderthals endemic to western Eurasia, and Denisovans endemic to eastern Eurasia. The success of H. sapiens outside Africa, the fact that our species expanded out of Africa and Neanderthals and Denisovans did not expand into Africa, is well explained by this general hypothesis of the asymmetric advantage of the mother ship.
There's decent reasons to think that Neanderthals and Denisovan's were cold and altitude adapted, specifically, both genetically and culturally. The "altitude adaption" gene Tibetans enjoy that improves physical performance at altitude even with lower blood oxygen levels actually came from Denisovans. And Neanderthals are well known to be the most cold-adapted hominin (Ocobock 2021).
This argues against them having many (or any) advantages if coming back to the heat and predominantly lower altitudes of Africa (the Rift Valley and Ethiopian highlands excepted). I don't think this challenges your assymetric advantage theory at all, I'm just pointing to these as plausible mechanisms.
Also, both archaic H Sap and modern H Sap shared ranges with both Neanderthals and Denisovans for many hundreds of thousands of years (hence our genetic mixing), but got wiped out (like all the other hominins) in the final culturally modern out-migration from Africa roughly 50kya, after the Cognitive Revolution - they weren't just wiping out Neanderthals and Denisovans, they were also wiping out other, less culturally (and maybe immunologically) sophisticated H Saps.
The issue with this story is that there is no evidence for any Cognitive Revolution before the last out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens. The best that is available is Blombos cave. But that episode happened too early (90ka) and no one has been able to show that modern humans populations derive the the Cape population responsible for Blombos, although some have made a valiant, if unpersuasive, effort (Rito et al. 2019). The story within Africa is much more complicated than anyone expected. There is no support for either within-Africa multiregionalism or (what would've been much more satisfactory) a single source region.
We don't know what the correct story is. But the simple story of a Cognitive Revolution occurring within Africa, followed by dispersal out of Africa has been totally refuted. If that story were true, we would be able to track behaviorally modern populations as they disperse within and without Africa from archeological proxies (symbolic storage). But that's just not the case. Anatomically modern humans do not exhibit behavioral modernity until much later, and they do not do so everywhere at the same time. The picture won't clear up until what is happening within Africa in the lead up to the dispersal is clarified. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-puzzle-of-human-origins.
The climatic adaptation thesis against Europeans/Neanderthals applies just as much to Africans/Sapiens. For if the former were cold adapted, the latter were warm adapted. So, that cannot explain the asymmetry. And as mentioned before, nor can any behavioral advantage due to language/cognition.
Really interesting post.
If I'm understanding correctly, the Boas-Chomsky universal is something like the capacity for symbolic and abstract thought?
If so, I agree with you that this was almost certainly not part of the Cognitive Revolution and last outmigration, it was happening in us way before then, and arguably it was probably even true for Neanderthals.
I think we have at least *suggestive* evidence that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought, via carvings, ornamental beads, likely grave goods (flowers, goat horns, jawbones in graves), and sophisticated multi-step technologies like pitch glue for spear affixing.
Quoting from one of my posts:
"We do think they were just as intelligent as us, however. They had art - “fine blades, pigments, ornamental beads, engraved artwork.”
Neanderthals were capable of quite complex problems solving, as they made pitch to affix spear heads to spear shafts, and this requires “synthesizing pitch from birch bark via a multi-step process that relied on strict control of temperature and required a dry distillation excluding oxygen.”
But they never made sleds despite living primarily in cold places. They never made boats. They didn’t store food.
In terms of art quantity, fewer than ten ornamental beads worked by Neanderthals have been found in 200k years of rich archeology, compared with thousands from H Sap. Similar comparisons apply to stone blades, stylized figurines, ritualized burials, and engraved symbols. They had the skills, but used them more rarely and later than H Sap."
I agree that figuring out whatever is going on with the San divergence and inter-Africa lineage and cultural mixing will be really interesting. The most likely overall theory I've heard is something like the European dynamic which could be broadly summarized as: "a bunch of similar technological-level cultures warring and fermenting within Africa until somebody reached an optimal cultural package, and then those folk went out of Africa and wiped all the other hominins out."
> The climatic adaptation thesis against Europeans/Neanderthals applies just as much to Africans/Sapiens. For if the former were cold adapted, the latter were warm adapted. So, that cannot explain the asymmetry. And as mentioned before, nor can any behavioral advantage due to language/cognition.
Agree, but I think there's a pretty plausible answer here on why the asymmetry was easier the other way. The big advantage culturally modern H Saps had in that last outmigration was group size, due to domestication and being less reactively aggressive than archaic H Sap, Neanderthals, and (probably) Denisovans.
Neanderthal groups, for example, were typically the size of only 1 or 2 families of immediate relatives, consisting of 10-30 people.
Archaic H Sap, partway on the road to domestication, had groups of roughly 20-50 people.
Modern H Sap had groups of 20-100 people.
Higher reactive aggression tendencies really makes cooperation and collaboration harder. Those smaller Neanderthals group sizes also whacked them on genetic diversity, which was much lower than in H Sap.
So basically, culturally modern H Sap comes out with better weapons and larger group sizes and better cooperation and coordination, and can wipe out the much-more-impressive-physically Neanderthals. Then in terms of cold and mountains, you can just adapt to those culturally. I wrote a post about that theory here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-bullies-and-inadvertently#footnote-21-149332133
No need even to reach for biogeography. The political-geographic fragmentation of Europe produced political competition and hence, over several hundred years, military and technological ascendancy over the less internally-competitive Chinese and Ottoman empires.
China has had a larger population than Europe for a millennium. Clearly population level alone isn't determinative. But whether Western states have the political will to make up for (or even substantially mitigate) their demographic deficit now is unclear.
Read the Flicking piece from Bloomberg - & was disappointed to see it hadn’t at all engaged with the core of Pettis’s argument re China (& other trade surplus nations) … which is available on almost a daily basis in twitterX & BlueSky.
Waiting for someone to directly take on the thesis of ‘Trade Wars Are Class Wars’. JW Mason has certainly written dissenting views in this area.
The burden for the case against the theory of imbalances doing anything interesting is on economists, not journalists. Few have tried because everyone understands its a second order correction term that could not do the heavy lifting of deindustrializing the West even if it tried. In any case, the US had deindustrialized long before the China Shock.
I have examined whether tariff protection boosts growth and found no evidence for it: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/do-protective-tariffs-boost-growth.
This is not to say that no thesis in Trade Wars Are Class Wars is sustainable. It is true, that Pettis argues, that global imbalances are due to wage suppression (especially so in Germany, due to Hartz IV). But there is no evidence that China's high savings policy has hurt the US. The numbers just don't add up. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/notes-on-us-china-policy. Relatedly, the idea that global imbalances are responsible for financial instability is also wrong. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/proof-that-global-imbalances-did.