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___It's pretty hard to come up with archeological behavioral evidence as it is. Even well preserved artifacts attributed to behaviors (statuary, altars, tools, etc.) have inferred behavioral attributes hotly contested. Only recently did a 5,000 year old bison skull with an embedded stone spear point place the atlatl technology in the SW during that time period.
___190,000 years is plenty of time to erase human evidence; look what Katrina did to the Gulf Coast in just days, or Popeii & Herculaneum for that matter.
___This new work is very interesting; punctuated evolution anyone?
By Turtle
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I agree. The only inferable evidence that we have for the above hypothesis is the grossest evidence that observers can see: persistent writing, city building, and human use of money that we find in the archaeological record across Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Mediterranean, Northern European and Amerindian cultures. City building, to take one example spread across the species within a particularly brief period. It manifested itself with remarkably similar engineering linearity among the cultures. Piled brick led to the post and beam. then gave way to the arch, and then to the braced strut. This occurred in the remarkably short time of five to ten thousand years. It also appears to have erupted in the Middle East and spread across Europe and Asia in a straightforward process of geographic diffusion via people migration. This is a very clear set of(generally) agreed archaeological observations.
The question for the punctuated evolution crowd was/is, what human niche/island ecology first showed persistent human city building(hive behavior?)? Then the archaeo-geneticists have to figure out some kind of valid genetic drift mapping with markers to see if they can match the origin points of geographic diffusion of persistent city building in time with the increased influence of Microcephalin and “abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated” (ASPM) across the human populations? That investigators have to look for the grossest of one to one coincidences between the two(suggested) markers is evident from the poverty in the archaelogical record below the blatantly obvious that we can successfully interpret with confidence; as well as the need for a CLEAR archaeological test marker that can negate the above hypothesis. We have a reasonably good idea when
persistent city building shows up by geographical distribution, so I suggested this for the test marker.
The coincidence in time and geography of persistent city building with the increased influence of ASPM in human brains across in a set of multiple data points matched to emergent civilizations' appearances, of course, is insufficient to prove the hypothesis; however, if discrepancies were to show in the expected distributions between the two data sets, then the above hypothesis presented could be negated. It is the most plausible first test.
