Cro-Magnon woman (Wikicommons) – At northern latitudes, women had fewer opportunities for food gathering, so they were free to specialize in new and more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation.
I've published an article on the theory that cold Paleolithic winters selected for intelligence. This theory is often attributed to J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen but actually goes much further back. The article is open access (see link), and the abstract is provided below. Comments are welcome.
Rushton and Jensen argued that cognitive ability differs between human populations. But why are such differences expectable? Their answer: as modern humans spread out of Africa and into northern Eurasia, they entered colder and more seasonal climates that selected for the ability to plan ahead, in order to store food, make clothes, and build shelters for winter. This cold winter theory is supported by research on Paleolithic humans and recent hunter-gatherers. Tools become more diverse and complex as effective temperature decreases, apparently because food has to be obtained during limited periods and over large areas. There is also more storage of food and fuel and greater use of untended traps and snares. Finally, shelters have to be sturdier, and clothing more cold-resistant. The resulting cognitive demands are met primarily by women because the lack of opportunities for food gathering pushes them into more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation. The northern tier of Paleolithic Eurasia thus produced the "Original Industrial Revolution"—an explosion of creativity that preadapted its inhabitants for later developments, i.e., farming, more complex technology and social organization, and an increasingly future-oriented culture. Over time, these humans would spread south, replacing earlier populations that could less easily exploit the possibilities of the new cultural environment. As this environment developed further, it selected for further increases in cognitive ability. Indeed, mean intelligence seems to have risen during recorded history at temperate latitudes in Europe and East Asia. There is thus no unified theory for the evolution of human intelligence. A key stage was adaptation to cold winters during the Paleolithic, but much happened later.
Reference
Frost, P. (2019). The OriginalIndustrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 2019, 1(1), 166-181
https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012
19 comments:
If women were being selected for those practical abilities then wouldn't it follow that there were not excess women for a successful hunter to choose from based on their attractiveness alone?
@anonymous
I would say "No".
It never is or was a "one feature selection" process and it didn't happen like today.
1) Blond (different from the normal) hair catch the eye of the looking male
2) Then the male look for attractiveness / healthiness of the female
3) Then he look at her for skills and abilities
4) Then He "takes" her with him.
5) If the male think he was wrong, he dump the female (in this case the female had a very serious - life threatening - problem)
In real life exams & trials never end.
For sexual selection of women there has to be an excess of women in the sex ratio (ie some women don't get husbands). So if they are being selected for looks and the ability to do intellectually demanding tasks, then that reduces the effect of both if the two are not correlated. There is a tendency to assume that good looking people are intelligent though, so I suppose pure selection for attractiveness in females may have been selection for intelligence. Konrad Lorenz said that the Robin with the reddest breast is in every respect the best.
"looks and the ability to do intellectually demanding tasks"
"look" is an indicator for "good health"
the "ability to do intellectually demanding tasks" require good health too (sick, not healthy people find more difficult to concentrate and think.
Blond, red hair or blue eyes (contrasting with the majority in the group to be selected from) just catch the eye first and are examined first and get a suitable male companion first if they are good enough.
Cold weather doesn't explain why Eskimos or Siberians didn't evolve in a way similar to Europeans.
Peter, on an unrelated note, do you foresee any natural or evolutionary inhibitors of the current left-wing radicalization we're seeing in the West? Do things like diversity, open borders, globalism, LGBT, gender fluidity, interracial marriage, non-white fertility have some kind of *evolutionary* rather than political barriers (since we live in democratic societies where any kind of reversal to the policies of the past is unthinkable)?
@Truth Seeker
Cold weather pre-adapted europeans but Eskimos are still living in the Ice Age and Siberians can not use the sea to commerce.
It is not just "cold weather" or seasons; but cold come handy to kill the unadapted.
I suggest to differentiate between "left-wing radicalization" and their current policies.
The problem is about socialism. Left-wing push for socialism because it is a way to give power to their elites without these elites giving anything back. It is a form of parasitism.
As soon as these policies will not be useful to the leftists they will discard them. They will support tribalization of society because it is helpful to them to "divide and conquer". Of course it will not end well, but they are not interested in other well beings in the future.
These policies are working only if there are resources to be sucked out from the productive people: Europeans, Nord East Asians some indians. If/when they suck these faucet of wealth dry things devolve and the less productive and vulnerable start to suffer and, in the extreme, die off (Venezuelan style or worse).
The point is the weakest links will be killed / have problem reproducing first. The people willing to go along, not rebel, etc. What will be left is people harder to kill, better in creating networks of self-help, less emphatic, more reciprocating, etc.
Many of the immigrants will be the first casualties when the free stuff stop coming, because they are the less adapted to the environment.
The scandinavian countries will be interesting, because when the welfare will break down (it will happen, before or later) it will be interesting to see how the locals will survive compared to the immigrants.
My money is in many immigrants to leave as soon as the welfare go away in a serious way. Or die in cold.
Hi Peter,
Did these future-oriented people move south into Asia Minor? Otherwise how do we explain the origin of agriculture and writing?
Do you know the Must Farm excavation? (mustfarm.Com). The site is about 3000y old and on the website you will see some really amazing textiles made of plant fibre. But there is no evidence of writing. How can we understand the difference in intellectual development of complex material crafts vs complex symbols and communication?
Also, unrelated, I have been reading today about research suggesting that agriculture may have led to the retention of over bite, which in turn allowed the f and v sounds to become part of language. This really interests me because I have been wondering for some time if changes in mouth, lips, nose, brows, cheeks, might have had more to do with communication than with the accepted climate theory. Do you know of any research that touches on that idea?
"Did these future-oriented people move south into Asia Minor? Otherwise how do we explain the origin of agriculture and writing?"
IIRC, the current data show populations from Mesopotamia expanded north-west and they started mixing with North Europeans in the Balkans.
It is uncertain if the North Europeans mixed with them, just learned about the technology or something in between.
- If women were being selected for those practical abilities then wouldn't it follow that there were not excess women for a successful hunter to choose from based on their attractiveness alone?
Presumably most of the selection for cognitive ability operated after mating, when a family had already been formed.
- Cold weather doesn't explain why Eskimos or Siberians didn't evolve in a way similar to Europeans.
This is the argument of my article, i.e, there was subsequent evolution at lower latitudes. Northern hunting peoples were, however, the first to break free from the cognitive straitjacket of hunting and gathering.
- Did these future-oriented people move south into Asia Minor? Otherwise how do we explain the origin of agriculture and writing?
Yes, initially the inhabitants of the Middle East were "Basal Eurasians" who were anatomically half-way between sub-Saharan Africans and present-day Middle Easterners. They were then replaced, apparently by a more European-like population.
- Peter, on an unrelated note, do you foresee any natural or evolutionary inhibitors of the current left-wing radicalization we're seeing in the West?
The "left" has been transformed. It's no longer about defending the working class or proposing a genuine critique of society. In practice, it's becoming little more than a sock puppet for the new globalized elites. "Leftists" are no longer opponents of the system. They are, in fact, an integral part of the system. This is particularly the case with the Antifa, who have become an extrajudicial police force that can perform the dirty work that normal police are forbidden to do.
Nothing will change until people get out of their comfort zone and learn to speak up. At the very least, exercise your right to vote.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/05/ancient-siberia-was-home-to-previously-unknown-humans-say-scientists
"They were then replaced, apparently by a more European-like population."
oh give me a break, your European bias is nauseating. Natufians and Neolithic Levantines are "European-like" populations now?
And European populations don't even descend from European paleolithics. Europeans are primarily a mix of Yamnaya and ENF and a bit of HG in there.
Why do you deny European population replacement in Europe from the Middle-East and then try to invert it by calling Middle-Easterners "European-like" when its really the opposite if anything?
A few thoughts...
1. Judging by Khoisan and Australian Aboriginal test scores, I expect the "Out-of-Africa" founding stock of Eurasians had IQs in the mid 50s to lower 60s. Similarly, judging by the scores of Native Americans, indigenous Siberians, and Inuit populations (all of which faced cold winters in Eurasian, but largely escaped Eurasian agriculture), the average IQ of post-Ice Age Eurasians was around 90.
2. Most of the research I've read suggests that Basal Eurasians were not replaced by West Eurasians (i.e., the kind with Neanderthal admixture). Rather, they interbed with West Eurasians in the Middle East. The first Anatolian farmers, for example, were roughly half Basal Eurasian, half West Eurasian.
Groups like the Natufians also weren't replaced. Rather, they converged with other ancient Middle Eastern populations as the different groups unlocked the power of agriculture.
3. It doesn't seem like Europeans and East Asians are particularly closely related. East Asians are a population within the Eastern non-African macro-race. While Europeans and East Asians have converged genetically over the ages, this is more of an example of gene flow than common descent.
As Sean above posted, the first populations along the Arctic Circle were actually Northern Eurasian, a population somewhat more related to Western Eurasians. As the millennia passed, they mixed with East Asian populations from the south, before eventually being replaced by them.
As such, there's not much evidence that East Asians emerged in the far north. They certainly made their way up there over the millennia, but their distinctive characteristics emerged elsewhere.
This is more of a guess than anything, but I expect East Asians are a composite population of different peoples. I bet that the special adaptations to the cold we see in East Asians, such as epicanthic eyefolds, were actually developed in Tibet!
Similarly, there's significant evidence that special adaptations to the frigid environment of Tibet were first evolved by the Denisovans. Tibetans have a special adaptation to the high altitude by breathing quickly, and this adaptation is generally accepted to be from the Denisovans.
Time will tell, but I bet the cold adaptations we see in East Asians will be found to have emerged from ancient Eastern non-Africans breeding with Denisovans which had long adapted to the Tibetan plateau, perhaps around 30,000 years ago. This resulted in a Sherpa-like population which thereafter left the plateau and made its way across East Asia, absorbing or replacing other populations in region. Rushton wrote at length about how East Asians were cold adapted, and he may not have been wrong, but I expect they came from Tibet and not northern Siberia.
Once East Asians came to be and started pushing northward, it was so that their adaptations to the cold were far more effective than those of the initial North Eurasians, hence why Neo-Siberians are notably unrelated to previous Siberian populations and far more East Asian.
So in a nutshell, I agree with the hypothesis that cold winters boosted the IQs of hunter-gatherers, but I expect Europeans and East Asians faced them in different places.
I bet to be adapted in novel environment species must be adapted to previous, similar or near environment, based on gradual acquisition of new skills or techniques to survive. The capacity to plan ahead is needed not just on colder environment but also in any demanding environment, for example, in deserts. But, in very harsh but homogeneous-climate environments [the white or the sunny deserts] also tend to deselect or to select for limited creativity. So, homo sapiens who migrated to other places, already had partial or fully developed capacity to plan. Very harsh environment mean ''the environment is too much for you so you must be capable to equalize this disadvantage''. It's select for planning skills but also for social conformity not in itself but like a artfact of huge selective pressure selecting only people who are fully equipped to survive in such places.
At priori, heterogeneous climate environments selects to providence while homogeneously colder environments doesn't, not in the plastic way. whatever.
"Most of the research I've read suggests that Basal Eurasians were not replaced by West Eurasians (i.e., the kind with Neanderthal admixture). Rather, they interbed with West Eurasians in the Middle East."
Sid,
Yes, there was interbreeding, but Basal Eurasian ancestry now accounts only for a fraction of current Middle-Eastern ancestry. See:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19310
"Groups like the Natufians also weren't replaced."
See above. The term "replacement" doesn't exclude some admixture. The Neanderthals, for instance, were replaced, but there is measurable Neanderthal admixture in present-day Europeans.
"As the millennia passed, they mixed with East Asian populations from the south, before eventually being replaced by them."
That used to be a popular model. It has been largely refuted by the archaeological evidence. That's why I discussed that evidence at some length. East Asians are a population of northern origin, in some ways more Arctic-adapted than Europeans.
"Yes, there was interbreeding, but Basal Eurasian ancestry now accounts only for a fraction of current Middle-Eastern ancestry."
Ok, sounds reasonable. According to article, Middle Eastern populations during the Pleistocene were highly diverged from one another, even though the populations in the Levant, Anatolia, and Iran most usually were a hybrid of West Eurasian groups (with Neanderthal admixture) and Basal Eurasians ones (without said admixture) - around 50/50 each.
People from populations which largely descend from the Early Anatolian Farmers have notably lower amounts of Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA tests than other European populations, so I'd say the Basal Eurasian component is still considerable.
"That used to be a popular model. It has been largely refuted by the archaeological evidence. That's why I discussed that evidence at some length. East Asians are a population of northern origin, in some ways more Arctic-adapted than Europeans."
I don't really see the archeological evidence for East Asians emerging around the Arctic. For one, the most recent evidence suggests the first AMH in Siberia were Ancient North Eurasians and Ancient North Siberians, which were both more closely related to West Eurasian populations than East Eurasian ones. As time passes, the record indicates they gradually admixed with East Asian populations, with Native Americans and Kets being extant populations. Later on, Neo-Siberians with far more East Asian ancestry emerged and largely overtook much of the Arctic. This suggests East Asians came from elsewhere.
Where? I'm far from confident in my assertion, but I expect East Asians emerged as a combination of populations around Tibet and Southern China merging together. Some pushed northward and largely replaced the ANE and ANS, others went southward and replaced the Australasian populations, as you wrote in your article.
Tibet is a cold place and was even colder during much of the Pleistocene. Since East Asians have notable amounts of Denisovan admixture and Tibetans today have adaptations from archaic populations, it's far from impossible the earliest East Asians also received adaptations to the cold from them.
Even isolated populations, such as the Sherpa, have epicanthic folds. This to me suggests such adaptations came from Tibet.
more cognitively demanding tasks, like garment making, needlework, weaving, leatherworking, pottery, and kiln operation.
Were these skills and technologies missing from the southern climes?
Post a Comment