How to stop bullies and inadvertently build a world-dominating superweapon

And speculation on how to do it again

You know who sucks? A*holes. Bullies. People bossing you around, selfishly taking your stuff or time, but not giving much if anything in return. You know the type. We should do something about them.

This relatively uncontroversial proposal is the foundation of our species’ superweapon.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Chimps are famously a*holes. They have rigid dominance hierarchies, and spend a lot of the day beating up on each other. They’re roughly 600-1,000x more aggressive than we are.¹

In chimpanzees, males routinely go and beat up on females “just to show them they care.” It’s in fact one of the rites of passage - when a male teenage chimp transitions to being an adult, he goes around and beats up all the female chimps, one by one. In alternately horrifying and grimly amusing “through a mirror darkly” fashion, this seems to be a sign of regard and affection. In fact, each female has a particular male who beats her most often / most severely - and it is that male who most frequently fathers her next child.

I’m sure you remember that we’re ~98% chimps by genes. But a lot closer to home, essentially all of our ancestors were a*holes in this way too.

Hominids with these dynamics have a number of features - higher sexual dimorphism, high levels of testosterone in males, high reactive aggression, status based hierarchies that determine who mates the most and with whom, and more.

Chimps have all these characteristics, and so does pretty much every other hominid in our line, including our direct predecessors, H Heidelbergensis and even archaic H Sapiens, an earlier version of “us.”

But not us!

Humans, modern H Sapiens, have avoided this trap. We are not as sexually dimorphic, we are 1000x less reactively aggressive, our testosterone is much lower, and although we still care a lot about status, our societies are much more egalitarian and don’t usually follow universal rigid hierarchies.

This is a story about how this happened, and what it means.

This is a story about rising up and stopping bullies and a*holes, and inadvertently inventing a superweapon that led to us dominating the entire world.

This is the story I got from Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox.

If you’ve ever heard of “the myth of the noble savage,” it stems from the hundreds of explorers and ethnographers and athropologists (amateur or professional) finding remote tribes, interacting or living with or studying them, and then commenting to the wider world on their within-tribe peacefulness and amity.

“It is understandable why Elizabeth Marshall Thomas titled her book about the !Kung The Harmless People, Jean Briggs called hers about the Inuit Never in Anger, and Paul Malone called his book about the Penan people of Borneo The Peaceful People.”

At the same time, the death rates for males in hunter gatherer societies is staggering. Your lifetime odds of dying by violence as a HG male are something like 1/3. You’re not being killed by people in your tribe (mostly) - you’re being killed by other tribes nearby. We love our ingroups, and hate our outgroups.

“Among small-scale societies such as hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, Lawrence Keeley found that the kill rate from violence between groups was not only higher than in primate populations. It was also higher than the rates recorded in Russia, Germany, France, Sweden, and Japan from 1900 to 1990”

And this is despite two world wars in this time on the “state society” side!

What is the Goodness Paradox? The contrast between our very low ingroup aggression, and our very high outgroup aggression.

“But overall tendencies are clear: compared with other primates, we practice exceptionally low levels of violence in our day-to-day lives, yet we achieve exceptionally high rates of death from violence in our wars. That discrepancy is the goodness paradox.”

Earlier I used the term “reactive aggression.” Aggression is divided into two types - reactive and proactive. These are respectively “hot” or “cold” aggression, offensive vs defensive, impulsive vs premeditated. Broadly, emotion is high in reactive aggression, and often completely absent in proactive aggression.

Reactive aggression is an in-the-moment response to a threat. The kind you see from “aggressive” animals - bulls, mule deer, fighting fish. It’s a high testosterone phenomenon, and is vastly more common in males.

“Tempers flare. A fight starts, and somebody gets stabbed or shot. I’ve worked on cases where the principals had been arguing over a ten-cent record on a juke box, or over a one-dollar gambling debt from a dice game.”

One of the interesting things about us modern H Saps is that in pretty much every other animal, reactive and proactive aggression levels are tied together.

We aren’t the only ones to practice proactive aggression - chimps, wolves, lions, and others do as well. We ARE the only species who has extremely low reactive aggression tendencies, coupled with extremely high proactive aggression tendencies.

A nice example of the difference between us and other species in the book: if you packed a 747 with as many chimpanzees or cats as there are seats, it would be total pandemonium, absolute madness - but humans sit there quietly for hours. But what you DO have to be careful about is screening for bombs and guns. Our reactive aggression is extremely low, but our proactive aggression is high.

How did this happen?

Broadly, we self domesticated, and this is the thesis and heart of Wrangham’s book.

He supports this contention with multiply triangulated evidence throughout - with anthropology, neuroscience, behavioral psyche, studies of murderers, and much else. It’s overall a compelling and well argued picture.

What does “domesticated” mean? For that, we study what characterizes domesticated animals vs wild.

• Lower reactive aggression

• Reproduce faster

• Neotenic appearance and behaviors

• Smaller brain

• Smaller bodies

Humans have all these traits, as specifically compared to our direct ancestor H Heidelbergensis, or Neanderthals, or even relative to archaic H Sap.

These traits were traditionally argued to be convergent adaptive traits driven by eg cooking, or environmental adaptation, but he argues pretty convincingly that it’s a package deal driven by neural crest cell changes, which we can see by looking at cavies vs guinea pigs, wolves vs dogs, or wild foxes vs Byalev’s domesticated foxes.

Domestication is sticky - it’s retained even in species released into the wild - eg domesticated mink, dingoes, feral dogs, pigs. They don’t revert to their “wild” forms, even over hundreds or thousands of generations.

“Wolves are so innately aggressive to wolf “strangers” that the leading cause of death in the wild is being killed by other wolves, accounting for as much as 40 percent of adult mortality. Among packs of feral dogs, by contrast, killing a “stranger” from another pack has been described only once.”

It took us time, of course. Domestication is a slow process without a top-down hand guiding it.²

Wrangham estimates that we began self-domesticating roughly 500-700kya (kya = thousand years ago), roughly the time that we split from the Neanderthals. We went through a period of being “archaic H Sapiens,” where we had larger skulls and broader faces and more testosterone, closer to our predecessor, H Heidelbergensis, and gradually achieved the full domesticated physical and behavioral package over a few hundred thousand years.³

Our story is this, but unironically

Human Domesticity

The idea that humans are domesticated is very old. The Greeks considered themselves and Persians as domesticated as cows, pigs, and dogs.

The big question has always been “who domesticated humans?” because every other domesticated species was domesticated and actively bred by humans, and it was thought domestication requires some top-down chooser of traits.

But why couldn’t we have domesticated ourself? Wrangham argues that this was exactly the case, once again by triangulating from various disciplines.

If you look at ethnographies, hunter gatherer societies are generally extremely egalitarian, in the sense that they almost never have a king with broad powers, or a nobility, or any other explicit hierarchy. “Kings” requires agriculture, which ultimately breeds religious and leadership castes, and states and state capacity.

But we, humans, were formed in an evolutionary crucible of hunter gathering. Agriculture is only ~10k years old, anywhere in the world, so the bulk of our shaping has been in the hundreds of thousands of years that us and our predecessors spent as hunter gatherers.⁴

To the extent that there is leadership in HG bands, prestige or status is the most salient criterion. People compete for influence by “producing good arguments, creating good plans, being the best mediators, telling the best stories, or seeing the future most convincingly.”

The eternal struggle - suppressing and rooting out a*holes

Broadly, Wrangham argues that the selection pressures that self-domesticated us was ganging up on bullies and a*holes. He calls the way we did this “the execution hypothesis.”

“In regard to moral qualities, some elimination of the worst dispositions is always progress even in the most civilised nations. Malefactors are executed, or imprisoned for long periods, so that they cannot freely transmit their bad qualities….Violent and quarrelsome men often come to a bloody end.”

—Charles Darwin

He’s arguing that “bloody end” isn’t accidental, it’s deliberate.

Whenever some pre-civilizational alpha Chad gets it in his head to lord it over everybody else and try to take on a “king” or “tyrant” role over the entire tribe by force, he is kept in line by the rest of the men ganging up and killing him.

This is enabled by language - language allows you to conspire, to gossip, to whisper in dark corners and build consensus, so that when you act, you act in concert and with minimal risk to your own personal safety, and assurance of success.

In our modern era of debates against capital punishment, where we’re the least violent we’ve ever been, where the overwhelmingly vast majority of people have never been in a physical fight - much less a life-or-death struggle - it’s difficult to conceive of this.

But it has ample historical precedent, going back not-so-long ago. In the 1600’s, hundreds of felonies in the USA were capital crimes. Witchcraft, blasphemy, adultery, sodomy, being a Quaker, masturbation, “being a child of 16 or older who was a stubborn or rebellious son, or who smote or cursed a parent.”

Honestly, it sounds like if you looked at the wrong person funny, there’d be a judge stringing you up within the week.⁵

An English hanging day

Heck, hangings in England were a festive social affair, something between a holiday and a block party, but with a convict’s death as the centerpiece. It was not until the late 18th century that the public appetite for executions began to wane. Capital punishment is a universal human feature.⁶

And going back to the “woe betide you if you looked at the wrong person funny” - ample ethnographies⁷ attest to something best summarized as The Tyranny of the Cousins.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

—CS Lewis

Life in a small scale, relatively egalitarian hunter gatherer society where everyone knows everybody and everyone helps each other can sound ideal.

Disputes are solved communally, everyone’s voice is heard, you have no lord or king extracting your labor or snaffling all the good things for themselves.

But when a small group of married, established men in the society cooperate to take care of any dominant and selfish abusers of norms and propriety, there’s a darker side to it - they can now cooperate to establish whatever “norms and propriety” they feel like, and enforce it on pain of death.

“In the absence of domineering leaders, a social cage of tradition demands claustrophobic adherence to group norms.”

You literally live or die by your willingness to conform to the rules. The “completely made up by 5-15 dudes that you personally know” rules.⁸

I really love my friends and family, but the idea of living by every strongly held conviction they hold on pain of life or death seems like a….very suboptimal way of living.

I know we all like Bob, but we have RULES about how you should file your TPS reports! I’m sorry, but we’ve got to liquidate him.

The most surprising thing is that even in the face of the execution hypothesis, where refraining from being domineering and selfish is pushed for and policed on pain of death, a*holes spring eternal, and people keep popping up in these societies who try to selfishly dominate, and get cut down.⁹

This goes to explain (at least in part) the ubiquitousness of witchcraft or sorcery in the majority of HG societies throughout the ages. Obviously a capital crime, the accusation was most often leveled at those who had offended the group norms somehow.¹⁰

In a testament to the stirringly resilient nature of a*holery, we can estimate from some ethnographies the relative prevalence:

In the Gebusi, from 1940 to 1982, looking at 394 deaths in this period, 24.4% of men and 15.4% of women were killed as a result of accusation of sorcery.

In the Etoro, 9% of 55 adult deaths were by execution, with people accused of sorcery known for their “archetypical selfishness and lack of responsiveness to others.”

So even under pain of death, about 10-25% of the time, a*holes will pop up and a*hole so badly that they get put to death. It really is a deep and enduring part of our hominid legacy!

And as far as we are from capital punishment in most places today, in extremis it can still be just inches away. In WWII concentration camps, both starvation and food theft were rampant. The solution? The “bread law” - if somebody steals your food, you kill them. If you can’t do it, the rest of the group will.

“[O]ne law and one law only which all prisoners knew and accepted…And in a definite and clear-cut sense this particular ‘law’ was the foundation and focal point of moral order in the concentration camps.”

So that “ideal egalitarian society where all help each other” exists because selfish and aggressive would-be bullies are killed, and so ultimately rests on the most domineering behavior in the human arsenal.¹¹

Wrangham makes a pretty good argument against the primary alternative explanation, the “parochial altruism” hypothesis, which argues that positive selection for better cooperation in warfare drove our lower reactive aggression, rather than negative selection (execution). Basically, it wouldn’t work because it’s group selection.¹²

He then points out a lot of interesting potential downstream effects of said H Sap domestication (homosexuality,¹³ better theory of mind,¹⁴ the birth of innate morality¹⁵), and I recommend diving into the book for the details if you’re really interested.

The thing I’m more interested in is that self-domestication was a superweapon.

For you see, the other extant hominins at the time practiced the old ways - they weren’t domesticated.

Neanderthal

Neanderthals (and to an even greater degree, H Heidelbergensis, our direct progenitor species) were absolute units. The average male Neanderthal would be something like 5’ 5” - 9” and 80 -100kg (176 - 220 lbs), at 10% body fat. That’s competitive bodybuilder territory, and they didn’t get that big by doing 5 sets of 10 in a gym, they got there by literally hunting mammoths with spears and such.¹⁶

Male hunter gatherers (Hadza in this case)¹⁷ at 5’ 5” are ~45-55kg (100-120 lbs) - the Neanderthal has 35+kg of mass on them, and could probably toss them around like a toy in a wrestling match. In addition to having a lot of extra muscle, it’s very likely Neanderthals had higher testosterone too. And by “higher,” if you scale from facial width differences, the *average* Neanderthal male would have a 1-in-ten-thousand H Sap testosterone level - far, far out on the end of the bell curve. So they’d get a strength buff from their extra muscle mass directly, and an additional buff from much higher free testosterone.

In our last outmigration from Africa, the fully domesticated “culturally modern” H Sapiens completely dominated and wiped out Neanderthals and every other confrère hominin species everywhere modern H sap ran into them, likely due to larger group sizes, distance weapons, and better coordination and cooperation leading to better war technology, tactics, and strategy. We were a “category killer,” and the category being killed was “all other hominins in our ecological niche,” because we wanted it all for ourselves.

Remember now, that Neanderthals were the very definition of an alpha Chad. In a one-on-one match, or even a two-on-one match, they would surely dominate most H Saps, archaic or modern, and would be able to toss them around like little yappy dogs. And yet the Herculean adonises were utterly dominated and wiped out by us tiny, domesticated things. It must have felt like being overwhelmed by an army of Furbies. Furbies who came en masse, and fought really well.

Not only did we wipe out the Neanderthals and Denisovans, it’s possible we wiped out every other hominin as well.¹⁸

Better cooperation and larger groups let us create all the technologies we have today, all the culture and art we have today, and much more.

Individually, we suck! Compare us to Neanderthals or H Heidelbergensis on any physical front, we come up short.

Even intellectually, individually we are not all that impressive.

Well that sucks

In Henrich’s The Secret to Our Success, he relates many stories about European explorers marooned in various areas and struggling or dying, when local hunter gatherers easily survived en masse in the same areas.¹⁹ Some of them were in Arctic lands that the Inuit considered among their richest hunting grounds. Others were in jungles, surrounded by edible plants and animals. One particularly unfortunate group was in Alabama, and would have perished entirely if they hadn’t been captured and enslaved by local Indians first.

These were strong young men in their prime, often selected for intelligence and conscientiousness and education, and they starved due to lack of cultural knowledge.²⁰

Culture matters. Exchanging ideas with lots of people matters. Learning from others matters a lot.

Neanderthals were probably just as smart as us, individually. There’s a good chance they were *smarter* - their brains were actually bigger.

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.

Some of the distinguishing technologies that WE had, like small arrowheads, boats, poisons, glues, food stores, sleds and so on - were likely because you require a critical mass of people trading ideas and teaching each other, and Neanderthals socially struggled to reach that critical mass that allowed iterative learning and teaching due to higher reactive aggression and much smaller group sizes.²¹

The cooperation we created via self domestication is literally a superweapon, and it is what allowed us to dominate the entire world.

“Human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”

Jonathan Haidt

And the argument is - that 10% bee portion REALLY MATTERS.

Now I just need thumbs, and I’ll take over the world too

Brain size? Neanderthals had LARGER brains than us. Multiple hominins had brains the size of modern H Sap brains in recent times²² - H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals - it got them nowhere.²³

The Cognitive Revolution?²⁴ That’s all us. It was enabled by better cooperation,²⁵ which allowed the explosion of creativity and technology that has characterized us for our entire history since 50kya.

And I think it’s notable that our biggest societal risks now come from coordination problems.

If nuclear war, malevolent AI, superhuman AI in the wrong hands, or anything else really destroys a significant proportion of today’s wealth and societies, it will be because we weren’t able to cooperate ENOUGH.

But we’re *good* at cooperation - it’s sort of our thing. It’s our superweapon, and what allowed us to outcompete every other hominin, and to spread and prosper across the earth.

What would the next level of “cooperation” look like? What level of cooperation could actually reduce or eliminate our current level of coordination problems?

We figured out a way to do it without group selection before, which was legitimately hard. We need to do the equivalent to solve the next level of coordination.

We need to increase our “bee quotient” from 10% to, let’s say, 20%, to actually be able to pull together on the next level of problems with enough capacity to make progress.

I can only really think of three paths, but I welcome any other ideas or commentary:

1. Radical societal re-organization - These would be Stephensonian / Gibsonian clades, as seen in Diamond Age or The Peripheral. If we were in self-selected, high-trust, high-capability clades, we would route around a lot of the trust and “othering” and defect / defect dynamics that poison a lot of coordination problems today.

2. Gengineering - sort of the next step. Not only do you choose your local clade / government affiliation, but you gengineer various group-benefiting characteristics. Higher trust, more altruism, lower lying or deception, lower psychopathy, lower selfishness, higher conscientiousness. You would obviously only want to do this in your kids if you trusted that they would exist in a high trust and high functioning environment, otherwise they would be exploited.

3. Fully net beneficial top-down coordination - Kings suck because they coordinate you at the national level better, but snaffle most of the good stuff for themselves. Cooperating more at the current level of coordination problems requires individual sacrifice for the sake of the group, much like group selection, and who wants that? But what about a superhuman AI that solved automated production, and you can take part in the AI’s economy / benefits only if you do and cooperate when and how it says. Given the delta here, and the potential for a superhuman intelligence to distribute the load intelligently, I’m imagining the benefits can be extremely high, and the “asks” are probably pretty low, so everyone participating can be strongly net better off, and the AI can use the extra lift driven by solving the next level of coordination problems to drive a lot of net prosperity back to the participants.

None of those seem impossible, although I think going route 1 is less risky than route 3, because 3 relies on benevolence coupled with great power and threading a very difficult needle.

But it’s clear that we need SOMETHING, and that coordination problems are our current bête noire when it comes to increasing societal prosperity and happiness for a good chunk of people.

We’ve solved it once - let’s figure out how to do it again.

1. Wrangham et al. (2006)

2. But top down, it’s quite fast! Byalev is a Russian who took on the task of domesticating foxes - within 3 generations they had no aggression response, within 4 generations some kits would approach humans wagging, like puppies. At the sixth generation, they essentially had the full dog behavioral package.

Then the “domesticated elite” went from 18% of the population at 10 generations to 80% in 35 generations, very fast fixation when selected for.

3. At 300kya, we have specimens from Jerbal Irhoud who are intermediate between us and archaic H Sap. By 200kya our braincase was rounder and our faces smaller. At 40kya we had smaller more gracile skeletons overall. At 35kya sex differences in height and tooth size decreased (making us less sexually dimorphic), and brains finally became 10-15% smaller.

4. Going back to roughly a million years with H Heidelbergensis, and 2M with H Erectus.

5. Actually on the eastern seabord, your execution was supposed to happen within 4 days of the judgment, and even THEN citizens often took it into their hands to storm the jail and lynch the person before then anyways. The past is a foreign country.

6. Like language, division of labor, kinship and family structures, pair bonding, property and ownership, etc.

7. Christopher Boehm surveyed hundreds and concluded that in all cases for which there was adequate information, executions occur.

8. In most cases, it seemed to be dressed up in the trappings of religion and / or tradition, theoretically mitigating this, but still - I’m sure it came through pretty clearly for those on the receiving end.

9. Two examples:

A man in the San HG culture who had killed three men - community came together, resolved to solve the problem, and then the men communally ambushed him, firing arrows at him until he resembled a porcupine.

An Inuit named Padlu stole another man’s wife. The man came looking for his wife, and Padlu killed him. One by one, the husband’s brother and then friend came looking to try to rescue the wife, and Padlu killed them too. After this, a headman went to his camp and asked every man whether Padlu should be killed - they all agreed, and the headman went deer hunting with Padlu and shot him.

10. Wrangham relates a fairly chilling story where this happens:

“The named sorcerer is present. He is now in peril. If he gets angry and denies any responsibility for the illness, he may be seen as unrepentant. His best chance is to admit to a minor crime—in other words, confess to being a sorcerer, and agree to stop making the patient sick. That is what he does. Straining to maintain composure, he pleads for his life”

The fate of the accused would depend on divinations (and public opinion, as well as whatever public support the man would be able to muster among the men in the meantime).

11. And what about gossip? Yes, reputation matters. Gossip is a big part of maintaining social norms, moderating would-be-tyrants, and persuading the would-be-selfish to tone it down. But gossip isn’t enough. Because what of people who don’t care about gossip, or the opinions of others?

“Shunning would be insufficient to affect an individual who is able to intimidate or defeat all others in a fight. Subordinates’ resentment could be translated to effective resistance only by coalitionary force. Cooperation among the weaker individuals is needed.”

12. Basically, parochial altruism would be group selection: “The social instincts could not have evolved as a result of intergroup fighting, he said, because, even within the most cooperative and morally virtuous tribes, some people would be more selfish than others; and the more selfish people would have more babies than the moral. “He who was ready to sacrifice his life…would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature….”

13. He posits homosexuality as a juvenile remnant of self-domestication, just like in bonobos. He points out that the only other nonhuman animal in which exclusive homosexual preference is known is domesticated sheep, and then implicates the lower testosterone levels brought on by domestication as leading to more dipping below the absolute level in the prenatal environment needed to make homosexuality more likely. HH and Neanderthal did indeed have much higher testosterone, and he predicts (untestably at the moment, of course) that they would have had much lower homosexuality rates.

14. There’s a “theory of mind” cooperation test used on animals. Basically, an animal comes in and there’s a couple overturned bowls, with food under only one bowl. An unknown human will point at the bowl with the food. If you evaluate chimps and toddlers, dogs and wolves, wild and domesticated foxes, in all cases, the domesticated animals understand the human pointing and go to that box, and the wild ones do not.

15. “Our sensitivity to right and wrong is understandable as an evolved response to the extreme danger of being in the wrong.”

“Prominent human emotions not known to occur in animals include shame, embarrassment, guilt, and the pain of being ostracized, all of which are human universals. Involuntary and painful, they have been convincingly explained as mechanisms that show an individual’s commitment to a social group after his or her social standing has been jeopardized.”

“That is why even a three-year-old, seeing another child, or a puppet, using a pencil ‘wrongly’ (differently from what he has been told is ‘right’) will point out the mistake.”

16. Both HH and Neanderthals likely had primarily meat-based diets. We know this from Neanderthals thanks to isotope and tooth enamel analysis, and infer backwards to HH. So they *literally* had to go out and hunt their food every day, because plants weren’t a big portion of their calories.

17. A specific Hunter Gatherer tribe in Tanzania that anthropologists have spent a lot of time studying. The Hadza are quite interesting - language and genetics studies indicate they’ve been there for around 50k years, so they’re probably pretty close to “legacy” modern H Saps. Their language is a linguistic isolate. They’re not genetic isolates like the San (who amazingly, diverged ~200kya and have been relatively genetically isolated since), but are still fairly distinct and continuous.

18. I personally find it rather ominous and telling that essentially every other archaic hominin (H Erectus, H Heidelbergensis, archaic H Sap itself, possibly others like H Naledi), who were all global in extent and had survived multiple climactic shifts, lasted til ~200kya, which is right about when modern H Sap would have been fully domesticated, and even though the technological Upper Paleolithic tool and creativity explosion hadn’t happened yet, at this time they would have had the 2-3x bigger group size and the famous human predilection for slaughtering outgroups that is so perfectly balanced by the greater ingroup cohesion and lack of aggression.

I’m not suggesting a previously unknown outmigration from Africa of moderns, I’m suggesting archaic H Sap - which we know had been undergoing domestication selection for hundreds of thousands of years - got domesticated enough in its global range to wipe out everyone else around then, because that’s about when moderns got domesticated enough in Africa. Then we moderns wiped them out when we expanded and took over the entire earth, which becomes an ongoing trend (Yamnaya, etc).

Speculation, yes. But to me, it’s telling in the same way that “as soon as H Sap enters a new landmass, all the megafauna go extinct an archeological eyeblink later.”

19. Examples include Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition, The Burke and Willis expedition in Australia, and the lost colony of Roanoke.

20. Such as in the arctic, hunting for seals (and you can see why they didn’t come up with this, the iterative ratchet of culture is a massive force multiplier on any given individual’s intelligence):

“You first have to find their breathing holes in the ice. It’s important that the area around the hole be snow-covered—otherwise the seals will hear you and vanish. You then open the hole, smell it to verify it’s still in use (what do seals smell like?), and then assess the shape of the hole using a special curved piece of caribou antler. The hole is then covered with snow, save for a small gap at the top that is capped with a down indicator. If the seal enters the hole, the indicator moves, and you must blindly plunge your harpoon into the hole using all your weight. Your harpoon should be about 1.5 meters (5ft) long, with a detachable tip that is tethered with a heavy braid of sinew line. You can get the antler from the previously noted caribou, which you brought down with your driftwood bow.

The rear spike of the harpoon is made of extra-hard polar bear bone (yes, you also need to know how to kill polar bears; best to catch them napping in their dens). Once you’ve plunged your harpoon’s head into the seal, you’re then in a wrestling match as you reel him in, onto the ice, where you can finish him off with the aforementioned bear-bone spike.

Now you have a seal, but you have to cook it. However, there are no trees at this latitude for wood, and driftwood is too sparse and valuable to use routinely for fires. To have a reliable fire, you’ll need to carve a lamp from soapstone (you know what soapstone looks like, right?), render some oil for the lamp from blubber, and make a wick out of a particular species of moss. You will also need water. The pack ice is frozen salt water, so using it for drinking will just make you dehydrate faster. However, old sea ice has lost most of its salt, so it can be melted to make potable water. Of course, you need to be able to locate and identify old sea ice by color and texture. To melt it, make sure you have enough oil for your soapstone lamp.”

21. 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 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.

22. Well, if you consider 200-300kya recent, but you know, on paleoanthropological timescales, that’s basically yesterday.

23. Look at this graph - https://imgur.com/GF9KJGB - specifically look at the “technological progress” line chart at the bottom any time before 200kya, and the huge upslopes in brain sizes amongst multiple species (Erectus, Heidelbergensis, archaic H Sap), extending well into modern H Sap ranges during those times, but with “progress” basically flat nonetheless.

24. The Rennaissance-like explosion of creativity leading to a sharp uptick in tool quality and diversity, art, symbolic thought, and more, roughly 50-60kya, that preceded us outmigrating from Africa one last time and wiping everyone else out.

25. At least in part. Speculations on the dominant factor allowing the Cognitive Revolution include FOX gene mutations and / or esophogeal changes allowing greater capacity for language, changes in brain organization or wiring, larger groups leading to greater idea exchange, a creativity or technological tipping point achieved after a slow and steady increase, and more. But larger group sizes was almost certainly a major contributor, when looking at Neanderthal capabilities versus technology level, and the importance of iterative cultural learning.