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Sapient paradox

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Question of why human behavioral complexity is so recent compared to humanity's origins

The Sapient paradox is a question that can be formulated as "why there was such a long gap between emergence of genetically and anatomically modern humans and the development of complex behaviors?" Homo sapiens emerged as a species somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 (or even 200,000) years ago, but the behaviour that is associated with modern humans began to emerge and accelerate only 10,000 years ago. The question was first formulated by archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1996.

See also

References

  1. Donald, Merlin (21 January 2009). "The sapient paradox: can cognitive neuroscience solve it?". Brain. 132 (3): 820–824. doi:10.1093/brain/awn290. Retrieved 19 June 2022. The paradox is that there was a gap of well over 50 000 years between the speciation and tectonic phases.
  2. Renfrew, Colin (1 February 2008). "Solving the "Sapient Paradox"". BioScience. 58 (2): 171–172. doi:10.1641/B580212. S2CID 86429611. Retrieved 19 June 2022. called the "sapient paradox," that some of the complex behaviors now associated with humans took a long time to develop even after the emergence in Africa of humans who were fully modern in the anatomical and genetic senses.
  3. Renfrew, Colin; Frith, Chris; Malafouris, Lambros (12 June 2008). "Neuroscience, evolution and the sapient paradox: the factuality of value and of the sacred". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 363 (1499): 2041–2047. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0010. PMC 2606703. PMID 18292058. the biological basis of our species has been established for at least that time (and perhaps for as much as 200000 years), while the novel behavioural aspects of our 'sapient' status have taken so long to emerge or to construct themselves, or rather that they have done so very recently
  4. Iriki, Atsushi; Suzuki, Hiroaki; Tanaka, Shogo; Vieira, Rafael BRETAS; Yamazaki, Yumiko (2021). "The Sapient Paradox and the Great Journey: Insights from Cognitive Psychology, Neurobiology, and Phenomenology". Psychologia. 63 (2): 151–173. doi:10.2117/psysoc.2021-B017. S2CID 238444188.

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