Within the tradition of evolutionary anthropology and related disciplines, it has been argued that the development of these modern behavioral traits, in combination with the climatic conditions of the Last Glacial Period and Last Glacial Maximum causing population bottlenecks, contributed to the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens worldwide relative to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other archaic humans.
Arising from differences in the archaeological record, debate continues as to whether anatomically modern humans were behaviorally modern as well. There are many theories on the evolution of behavioral modernity. These generally fall into two camps: gradualist and cognitive approaches. The Later Upper Paleolithic Model theorises that modern human behavior arose through cognitive, genetic changes in Africa abruptly around 40,000–50,000 years ago around the time of the Out-of-Africa migration, prompting the movement of modern humans out of Africa and across the world.
Other models focus on how modern human behavior may have arisen through gradual steps, with the archaeological signatures of such behavior appearing only through demographic or subsistence-based changes. Many cite evidence of behavioral modernity earlier (by at least about 150,000–75,000 years ago and possibly earlier) namely in the African Middle Stone Age. Sally McBrearty and Alison S. Brooks are notable proponents of gradualism, challenging European-centric models by situating more change in the Middle Stone Age of African pre-history, though this version of the story is more difficult to develop in concrete terms due to a thinning fossil record as one goes further back in time.
To classify what should be included in modern human behavior, it is necessary to define behaviors that are universal among living human groups. Some examples of these human universals are abstract thought, planning, trade, cooperative labor, body decoration, and the control and use of fire. Along with these traits, humans possess much reliance on social learning. This cumulative cultural change or cultural "ratchet" separates human culture from social learning in animals. As well, a reliance on social learning may be responsible in part for humans' rapid adaptation to many environments outside of Africa. Since cultural universals are found in all cultures including some of the most isolated indigenous groups, these traits must have evolved or have been invented in Africa prior to the exodus.
Archaeologically, a number of empirical traits have been used as indicators of modern human behavior. While these are often debated[18] a few are generally agreed upon. Archaeological evidence of behavioral modernity includes:
- Burial
- Fishing
- Figurative art (cave paintings, petroglyphs, dendroglyphs, figurines)
- Systematic use of pigment (such as ochre) and jewelry for decoration or self-ornamentation
- Using bone material for tools
- Transport of resources over long distances
- Blade technology
- Diversity, standardization, and regionally distinct artifacts
- Hearths
- Composite tools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Paleolithic#Origin_of_behavioral_modernity
The Transition to Modern Behavior
Modern behavior can be recognized by creative and innovative culture, language, art, religious beliefs, and complex technologies (d'Errico & Stringer 2011). One of the evolved capabilities underlying modern behavior is the ability to communicate habitually and effortlessly in symbols. The pervasiveness of symbolism in present-day human culture is the reason why archaeologists frequently search for artifacts that reflect ‘symbolically mediated behavior' (Henshilwood & Marean 2003). Modern behavior also consists of other components such as advanced problem solving and long range planning abilities (Wynn & Coolidge 2011). Archaeological artifacts that were produced by thinking ahead of future actions, anticipating problems and preparing responses provide evidence for modern planning abilities (Wadley 2010).
Traces of 'Modern Behavior' in the Archaeological Record
When the standard of symbolism is applied, it can be shown that artifacts of a clearly symbolic nature appear only after 100,000 years ago (Henshilwood et al. 2002, Henshilwood et al. 2004, d'Errico et al. 2009, Texier et al. 2010). These artifacts include beads as well as ochre and ostrich eggshell with geometrically engraved patterns.
The evolution of modern planning capabilities can be investigated by analyzing the decision steps used to produce ancient tools. There are, for example, many different ways of making stone artifacts. Over the last 200,000 years a variety of reduction techniques in different combinations were used to make stone tools. This resulted in different techno-complexes, but all with the same degree of complexity. This may mean that humans had essentially modern cognitive capabilities for this period of time (Shea 2011). Using variability in stone tools as a marker has the advantage of including the most ubiquitous and widely studied type of material culture in the archaeological record in the search for modern behavior (Nowell & Davidson 2010). Advanced planning abilities were necessary to produce some ancient hunting weapons. For at least the past 200,000 years hunting implements were made by mounting sharp stone tools on a shaft with the aid of adhesives. The backed artefacts from the Howiesons Poort, dating to around 65,000 years ago in South Africa, are examples of such hafted stone tools.
Microscopic analysis of Howiesons Poort backed tools from Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, revealed hafting microtraces associated with microresidues of ochre and acacia gum (Lombard 2008). Lyn Wadley and her team experimentally produced adhesives using these materials, and tested how to haft stone tools to shafts. They found that several ingredients, including ochre, plant gum, and fatty substances were combined to produce the compound adhesive. In addition, several procedures and complicated use of fire, or pyrotechnology, had to be manipulated to achieve the appropriate consistency for an adhesive that would successfully join the tool to the haft when thrown. The cognitive strategy used to produce and manipulate the adhesive in the Howiesons Poort 65,000 years ago indicates multitasking and planning capabilities typical of modern people (Wadley et al. 2009, Wadley 2010).
The Transition to Modern Behavior | Learn Science at Scitable
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-transition-to-modern-behavior-86614339/
From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviourally modern
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048993/
- blade and bladelet technology;
- microlithic technology;
- the first portable art, comprising figurines of women (Venuses) and animals;
- the first parietal (or wall) art, consisting of paintings and engravings in caves (Cook 2013);
- the earliest bone, ivory, and antler tools;
- ochre or other pigment processing;
- specialization in hunting one or two species of animals;
- the use of fish or shellfish;
- more complex burials;
- long-distance exchange of raw materials and finished items;
- the first information networks and emergence of ethnic groups; and
- the spread of people into new regions, such as Siberia, the Americas, and Australia.
Based on worldwide hunter-gatherer ethnographic data, Binford (1980) also argued that only modern people could organize themselves using a collector strategy of mobility, where one brings resources to people. As a result, people could be permanently settled year-round in the same community, which is the opposite of what he called the forager strategy, where people moved seasonally to resources (Binford 1980, 1989). Thus only Upper Paleolithic “modern” hunter-gatherers could have permanent settlements.
The identification of a whole suite of innovations with the onset of the Upper Paleolithic led to the creation of a model that was unquestioned until the late 1980s. This model has been variously labeled;
- the human revolution,
- the creative revolution,
- the dawn of belief, or
- the quantum leap
(Dickson 1990; Mellars 1989; Mellars et al. 2007). For some researchers, the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia at the same time as modern humans was not a coincidence (Mellars 2005). But for others, most of the innovations said to be unique to this period had actually occurred earlier (D’Errico 2003; D’Errico et al. 2003; Nowell 2010). However, as it became clear that there were anatomically modern people in the African Middle Paleolithic as well as at Skhūl and Qafzeh, ideas started to change. While the Upper Paleolithic was still the period associated with modern innovations, it began to be recast as behavioral modernity.
Modern Human Behavior | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology
Examples of elements that may be considered cultural universals are:
- language,
- religion,
- art,
- music,
- marriage,
- gender roles,
- the incest taboo,
- myth,
- cooking,
- games, and
- jokes.
While some of these traits distinguish homo sapiens from other species in their degree of articulation in language based culture, they all have analogues in animal ethology. 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 Africa prior to the exodus.
Classic evidence of behavioral modernity includes:
- finely made stone and bone tools,
- fishing
- evidence of long-distance exchange or barter among groups,
- game playing,
- systematic use of pigment,
- self-ornamentation,
- burial, and
- abstract carvings.
A more terse definition of the evidence is the behavioral B's: blades, beads, burials, bone toolmaking, and beautiful.
The evolution into anatomically modern humans, particularly in brain anatomy, is mostly believed to be a precursor for behavioral modernity and is generally believed to predate it by tens of thousands of years.
It might be thought that BM preceded language but it is evident from the list above that they must have been at least contemporary developments.
Behavioral modernity | Psychology Wiki | Fandom
https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
Some scientists interpret this as suggesting the earliest Homo sapiens weren’t entirely modern. Yet the different data tracks different things. Skulls and genes tell us about brains, artefacts about culture. Our brains probably became modern before our cultures.
The “great leap” For 200,000-300,000 years after Homo sapiens first appeared, tools and artefacts remained surprisingly simple, little better than Neanderthal technology, and simpler than those of modern hunter-gatherers such as certain indigenous Americans. Starting about 65,000 to 50,000 years ago, more advanced technology started appearing: complex projectile weapons such as bows and spear-throwers, fishhooks, ceramics, sewing needles.
People made representational art – cave paintings of horses, ivory goddesses, lion-headed idols, showing artistic flair and imagination. A bird-bone flute hints at music. Meanwhile, arrival of humans in Australia 65,000 years ago shows we’d mastered seafaring.
This sudden flourishing of technology is called the “great leap forward”, supposedly reflecting the evolution of a fully modern human brain. But fossils and DNA suggest that human intelligence became modern far earlier.
When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the evolution of modern intelligence
https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human...
Cultural modernity: Consensus or conundrum? | PNAS
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/17/7621
These people were not “behaviorally modern,” meaning they did not routinely use art, symbols and rituals; they did not systematically collect small animals, fish, shellfish and other difficult-to-procure foods; they did not use complex technologies: Traps, nets, projectile weapons and watercraft were unknown to them.
Premodern humans—often described as “archaic Homo sapiens”—were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.
Refuting a Myth About Human Origins | American Scientist
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/refuting-a-myth-about-human-origins
Strikingly, behavioral modernity did not emerge on a par with cognitive modernity. On the contrary, it is only well after our split from Neanderthals and Denisovans that modern behavior becomes evident around the world (see Mellars et al., 2007; but also Hoffmann et al., 2018; for tentative evidence of behavioral modernity in Neanderthals).
This emergence of modern behavior has been linked to the rise of modern languages, i.e., exhibiting features such as elaborate syntax including extensive use of recursion. The potential of these languages to convey sophisticated meanings and know-how in ways that allows sharing of knowledge with others is assumed to have arisen in a reciprocal relationship with complex cultural practices (Sinha, 2015a,b; Tattersall, 2017). Thus, even if not its main trigger, complex language is at the very least a by-product and facilitator of modern behavior.
Because the human brain and human cognition have remained substantially unmodified since our origins, behavioral modernity and modern languages are assumed to be the product of cultural evolution via niche construction (Sinha, 2009, 2015b; Fogarty and Creanza, 2017). This may include feedback effects of culture on our cognitive architecture in the form of the creation of “cognitive gadgets” (Clarke and Heyes, 2017) through small modifications in learning and data-acquisition mechanisms like attentional focus or memory resources (Lotem et al., 2017), but without involving significant neuro-anatomical changes.
However, this explanation may be insufficient: Recent research suggests that aspects of the human distinctive globular skull and brain might have evolved gradually within our species in response to accompanying genetic changes, reaching present-day human variation between about 100 and 35 thousand years ago (kya), in parallel with the emergence of behavioral modernity (Neubauer et al., 2018). Thus, it may not be entirely appropriate to equate neuro-anatomical modernity with cognitive modernity; instead, the language-ready brain can be conceived of as a brain with the potential for cognitive modernity. Here we argue that these neuro-anatomical and concomitant behavioral changes are largely manifestations of human self-domestication, which constitutes a possible pathway toward cognitive modernity and sophisticated linguistic abilities. We focus specifically on parenting and teaching behaviors as foundations of cultural transmission processes that may have facilitated the exploitation of our cognitive potential and, ultimately, the emergence of modern languages.
The Emergence of Modern Languages: Has Human Self-Domestication Optimized Language Transmission?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00551/full
Upper Paleolithic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Paleolithic
Origins of society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_society
Early modern human
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human
The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7396614/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_music
Development of behavioral modernity by hominins around 70,000 years ago was associated with simultaneous acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called prefrontal synthesis, and conversion of a preexisting rich-vocabulary non-recursive communica… | bioRxiv
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art
Prehistoric religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_and_ritual
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_mythology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_behavior_in_animals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science_of_religion
How and why did religion evolve? - BBC Future
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190418-how-and-why-did-religion-evolve
Evolutionary origin of religions - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_religion
