F Rosa Rubicondior: Culture
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture. Show all posts

Friday 8 March 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Like Humans, Bumblebees Learn Through Social Interaction And May Have Cumulative Culture


Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris
Source: Wikipedia.
Bees master complex tasks through social interaction - Queen Mary University of London

A sacred Tenet of creationism is that we humans are a special creation by the creator of the universe who made everything just for us. They point to the many 'unique' traits and abilities of humans as evidence of this - the ability to teach and learn, to form cultures, even walking upright are frequently cited as examples. It's also a sacred Tenet of creationism that anything which might refute the sacred tenets of creationism must be ignore, hand-waved aside or misrepresented but never, ever acknowledged for what it is - a refutation of creationism.

So, we can expect one or more of those tactics for handling the cognitive dissonance that news that bumble bees can teach and learn and so have at least the basis for forming cumulative cultures. The news itself comes in the form of an open access research paper in Nature by a team Led by Dr Alice Bridges and Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London.

The team showed that a complex, two-step task, which needed to be performed to receive a reward in the form of a sweet liquid could be learned by bees who were allowed to watch a trained 'demonstrator' perform the task. The bees not only learned how to perform the steps involved but that there was a reward to be had for doing so.

The 'demonstrators' had previously been trained by giving intermediate rewards as each stage was completed successfully, which were eventually withdrawn, leaving only the final reward. The experiment and its significance are explained in a Queen Mary University news release:

Sunday 11 February 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Social Learning Is Part of Beaked Whale Culture - Just Like Humans


Surprising Behavior in One of the Least Studied Mammals in the World - SDU

Continuing where I left off with the account of how orcas (killer whales) form distinct cultures based on food, hunting strategies, location and dialect, which parallel human cultures in many way, we now have evidence that at least one of the 24 known species of the beaked whales, Baird's beaked whale, form cultural groups, and that another 'human' trait - social learning - is involved in the formation of these cultures.

Creationists, of course, continue to insist that only humans form cultures and have the social ethics that hold them together because they were specially created in a way that makes them materially different to all other animals, and by the circular reason that often typifies creationist arguments, this proves they were specially created by a god who holds them in the highest esteem.

s But as we are learning, almost all the traits creationists try to claim are uniquely human and therefore proof of our special creation, are turning out to be common to many other species, especially mammals, and so are evidence for common ancestry and evolution by descent with modification.

The little-known beaked whale, a relative of orcas and dolphins, has recently been observed changing its habitat and hunting strategy by a process of social learning. This is the same process by which growing children adopt the social norms and customs of their culture and how people from other cultures can assimilate into unfamiliar cultures. Essentially it means observing others and memorizing what they do in any given situation.

This observation was made by researchers from the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) led by Olga Filatova, a whale expert and postdoc at Department of Biology and SDU Climate Cluster. She led the study which showed that some pods of orcas in the Pacific have occupied the same area since the last Ice Age glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago when they occupied warmer refugia and adopted them as permanent territories. The same study showed how orcas form distinct 'ecotypes' which are genetically isolated from other ecotypes by cultural barriers to interbreeding.

For the beaked whale study, the team observed a population of Baird's beaked whales, which has unexpectedly been found near the coast and in shallower waters than previously observed.

Their work has been published, open access, in the journal Animal Behaviour and is explained in a SDU press release by Birgitte Svennevig:

Saturday 10 February 2024

Creationism in Crisis - How Killer Whales Were Evolving Cultural Groups - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'


Researchers find 20,000 years old refugium for orcas in the northern Pacific - SDU
The northern Pacific near Japan and Russia is home for several different groups of orcas. They have no contact with each other, do not seek the same food, do not speak the same dialect, and do not mate with each other. Some are the descendants of a pod that moved there during the last Ice Age.

Any study of whales, such as dolphins and they larger cousins, the orca's or killer whales will quickly dispel one of the myths creationists use to try to justify their absurd belief that humans are somehow materially different to the rest of life on Earth in a way which isn't just because we are a variation on the general mammalian theme with enough distance between us and related species to justify a separate taxon, because we were specially created - humans form cultures and have languages and traditions, etc.

Of course, it's not just the whales that have cultures and languages; chimpanzees and bonobos and other primates also have distinct cultural groups that differ significantly from one another, but this article deals specifically with orcas and the research which has shown that they moved into Ice Age refugia at the last glacial maximum, some 20,000 years ago, and some have slayed there ever since.

The article also illustrates a problem of modern taxonomy in how to define a species with hard and fast rules when the distinction in reality is fuzzy. Some of the pods studied form isolated cultural groups that seek different foods to the others, which speak a different dialect, move in a specific area, and never interbreed. This cultural barrier to hybridization is as much a barrier as is the different plumage and mating rituals that are the pre-zygotic barriers to interbreeding that justify classifying many related birds as distinct species because the barriers ensure an isolated gene pool in species that could successfully interbreed and do so in captivity. Killer whales exist in many pods with cultural barriers to interbreeding and so form isolated gene pools, yet they are regarded as a single species.

To overcome this problem, biologists have classified the different killer whale pods into 'ecotype', but it is this genetic isolation that enables genetic analysis to determine how long the pod has been isolated.

A research team led by whale biologist, Olga Filatova, of the University of Southern Denmark recently published an open access paper in the journal Marine Mammal Science showing how environmentally stable marine regions may have preserved refugial populations of the killer whale that retained historical genetic and cultural diversity. These whales are believed to have moved into the warmer refugia during the last Ice Age.

The team's work is explained in a University of Southern Demark (SDU) press release by Birgitte Svennevig:

Friday 12 January 2024

Unintelligent Design - Neurodegenerative Diseases Such As MS & Alzheimer's Traced Back To Early North European Farmers - 24,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'


Life in Bronze Age Britain (artist's impression)
Ancient DNA reveals reason for high MS and Alzheimer's rates in Europe

Researchers have just completed a massive gene bank for ancient humans who lived in Eurasia up to 34,000 years ago (i.e., up to 24,000 years before creationist dogma says the universe and everything in it was magicked out of nothing by a god made of nothing who self-assembled out of nothing before there was time and space to self-assemble in.

The gene bank has enabled researchers to trace the historical and geographical spread of genes and diseases, producing four papers published in Nature. This article deals with just one of them; others will follow.

The results should disturb any creationists who has the courage to read about them because, not only did it all occur long before the mythical 'Creation Week' that is central to their superstition, but is shows that any designer either could not have been omniscient, or must have been malevolent, because it shows how the genes for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) arose in North Europe, probably as a side-effect of evolving genes to increase resistance to the diseases carried by domestic animals. An omniscient designer who deigned them should have been aware of what they would also cause, so either isn't omniscience and didn't know what its design would do, or created MS deliberately.

As the University of Cambridge News release explains:

Thursday 4 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Monogamy Predates Christianity By Millions of Years


Early Primates | | UZH
Religious fundamentalists like to assume they have ownership of the institution of marriage because the 'right' form of marriage was dictated by their imaginary god so we should all subscribe to their approved form of it. In many formerly majority Christian countries, the Christian-based marital laws are one of the few remaining vestiges of a time when Christianity imposed itself on everyone, believers, non-believers and non-Christians alike, arrogantly believing it had a divine right to rule.

But recent research has shown that a form of flexible monogamy, or more or less stable social parings of a female and a male is common if not the norm in the primate family. It was most likely incorporated into religions because some human tribes thought of monogamy as the 'right' form of sexual relationship, so any god whom the priesthood wanted to be taken seriously had to hand down 'morals' that the people thought were right and proper. After all, the only way to tell if a god is a good god or an evil god is to compare its morals and behaviour to that of an external standard of 'good', is it not?

If you think not, you have to believe that if your god had told people to hurt babies, rob banks and hit old ladies, those would now be considered moral acts and people who didn't do them would be regarded as immoral and deserving of punishment or other social sanctions. Christian apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig, has even declared that a seemingly immoral act such as infanticide, is morally right if you believe his (but only his) god commands it, and it would be immoral not to carry out such a divine command.

But William Lane Craig's repugnant idea of what constitutes morality is straying somewhat off the point, which is the 'right' form of marriage in human society, which William Lane Craig presumably believes is divinely commanded by his god and therefore mandatory for the rest of us.
But, absolute monogamy is not the universal norm in modern human sexual relationships, even in societies which only permit monogamous marriage, and probably never has been. Humans can best be described as mostly monogamous, most of the time, with 'infidelity' by both sexes being fairly common to the extent that some estimates put the number of people who have a different father to the one they think is theirs at about 25%. In some cultures, such as Islamic, bigamy is normal and, as evidenced by baptism records, pre-marital sex was commonplace in 19th Century England.

Sunday 17 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Woolly Dogs Of The American Coast Salish People Predate 'Creation Week'


Researchers, Coast Salish People Analyze 160-Year-Old Indigenous Dog Pelt in the Smithsonian’s Collection | Smithsonian Institution
The reconstructed woolly dog shown at scale with Arctic dogs and spitz breeds in the background to compare scale and appearance; the portrayal does not imply a genetic relationship.
Credit: Karen Carr.
During that long period of Earth's 'pre-Creation Week' history, before anyone told the people of Siberia that they should wait to be created then wiped out in a genocidal flood before forgetting all about it and only then going to live elsewhere, they migrated to North America, taking their domestic dogs with them.

This is the sort of nonsense that creationism requires you to believe in order to reconcile the scientific evidence with the creation myths of a bunch of Bronze Age Canaanite farmers who thought Earth was small, flat and had a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Obviously, these people had almost certainly never heard of Siberia or North America or realised that there were other people living there and were as ignorant of most of Earth's long history as they were of cosmology, biology and geology.

One of the things the Bronze Age Canaanites would never have guessed was that some of the domestic dogs the Siberians took with them had genes for a dense wooly fur that could be woven into blankets and other fabrics, but now a team of researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have carried out a detailed DNA analysis of the pelt of the last known example of this breed of dog (a dog known as Mutton). Mutton died in 1859 and his pelt was sent to the Smithsonian Institute where it remained until it was rediscovered in the early 2000's.

The analysis has shown that the line diverged from the other dogs about 5,000 years ago (i.e., before creationist superstition says all life on Earth was exterminated in a genocidal flood when their 'all-loving' god flew into a rage because its creation wasn't working as intended).

They have shown that its closes genetic relationship is with the pre-colonial dogs from Newfoundland and British Columbia. The Indigenous Coast Salish communities in the Pacific Northwest (in Washington state and British Columbia) for millennia held these wooly dogs in high esteem, regarding them almost as family members and often keeping them in pens or on islands to prevent them interbreeding with other dogs, to maintain the quality of their wool. This isolation prevented the ingress of genes from other dogs and even from the dogs later colonists brought with them. The genes recovered from Mutton's pelt show that 85% of his genes were from pre-colonial dogs.

The Smithsonian researchers have, with the assistance of Coast Salish Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Master Weavers, now traced the place of the woolly dogs in Coastal Salish culture and the reasons for its decline. Their findings are published in Science and tell a sorry tale of colonial destruction of a people and their culture. Instead of, as has been suggested, the arrival of machinery and woven blankets made the wooly dogs expendable, the truth is that, due to disease and colonial policies of cultural genocide, displacement and forced assimilation, it likely became increasingly difficult or forbidden for Coast Salish communities to maintain their woolly dogs and a 1000 years or more of careful selective breeding was wiped out within a couple of generations.

Sunday 1 October 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Killer Whales Exibit 'Uniquely Human' Behaviour


Why Are Killer Whales Harassing and Killing Porpoises Without Eating Them? | UC Davis
A pod of Southern Resident orcas
Photo: NOAA Fisheries.

The problem creationists have with trying to cling to a counter-factual superstition like theirs is that so many facts run counter to it. To normal people, that might be considered a good reason to reassess their opinions and drop those shown to be at odds with the facts and form some based on reality instead.

Not so creationists. To a creationist, the thought of being wrong is an existential threat which, if allowed to develop, would destroy their entire world view which has them at the centre of a specially created universe, the creator of which holds them in high regard. Dropping this childish belief would mean they don't feel as important as they think they are and would maybe have to think the unthinkable - a universe which doesn't have them at the centre of it and eventual oblivion in which the world continues to exist and function without them in it or able to observe it from a privileged position.

The Salish Sea. Location for the study.
All my recent blog posts, especially the 'Creationism in Crisis' series, have shown instances where scientific research has revealed facts which refute basic creationist articles of faith and cult dogmas, and this one is no exception. It deals with a core dogma - that humans were a special creation, created in some material way differently to all other life forms, to which they bear no relationship.

Traditionally, creationists cite examples of how humans are unique, having characteristics shared by no other species - ignoring the fact that that pretty much defines a species and the same case can be made for every other species. One of these is of course another creationist sacred cow - humans have social ethics and a conscience, which creationist dogma asserts could only have come from their particular creator god - the same god whom they believe inflicted a mass genocide on Earth and creates parasites, apparently.

Explaining social ethics, or pr-social behaviour, and a conscience which motivates pro-social behaviour, rewarded by endorphins, is not difficult for science to explain as the result of gene-meme co-evolution in a cooperative species that could not survive as individuals without the support of a social group.

And, to reinforce that, we now have evidence of pro-social behaviour and human-like activities in another species - the orca or killer whale.

At least, that's the explanation for an observed change in behaviour of a pod of orca in the Salish Sea, described in a paper published, open access, in Marine Mammal Science. The investigating team was co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of University of California Davis (UCDavis) School of Veterinary Medicine.

First a little background on the Southern Resident killer whales, the subject of the study:

Monday 10 April 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution

Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus
Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus
Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus
Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus
Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus
Creationism in Crisis

The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback Thanks to Human Cultural Evolution
Monk seal, Monachus monachus

Monk sealMonachus monachus
The Mediterranean Monk Seal Is Making a Comeback | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

With 99% of all known species having gone extinct, creationists still like to imagine an omniscient god created them. One must assume, therefore, that they believe it created them to go extinct!

It's a strange sort of intelligence that would intelligently design something to fail, but that's the sort of double think creationists need to be capable of to be members of their anti-science cults.

But the good news is that one of these 'creations', the Mediterranean Monk seal, is making something of a comeback, having been reduced to about 800 individuals, mostly around the coast of Greece.
The Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) is one of the world's most endangered marine mammals and is the only seal species endemic to the Mediterranean Sea. The species is characterized by its monk-like hood, and its gray-brown fur with lighter colored undersides.

Here are some key facts about the Mediterranean monk seal:

Habitat: Mediterranean monk seals are found in the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic Ocean, primarily along the coastlines of Greece, Turkey, and North Africa.

Population: According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Mediterranean monk seal population is estimated to be between 500 and 700 individuals, making it one of the rarest mammals in the world.

Threats: The primary threats to Mediterranean monk seals include habitat loss, human disturbance, entanglement in fishing gear, and hunting. The species has been heavily exploited for its fur, oil, and meat, and has suffered from a decline in its prey species due to overfishing.

Conservation Efforts: The Mediterranean monk seal is protected under various national and international laws, including the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals and the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. Several conservation organizations are also working to protect the species, including the Mediterranean Monk Seal Conservation Society and the Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal.

References:
ChatGPT. (10 Apr 2023). Tel me about the Mediterranean Monk seal, with references, please. [Response to a user question]. OpenAI.
The Monk seal was once abundant around the Greek coast and used to breed on the beaches but evolved a change of habit due to persecution by humans who saw it as competition for fish. It now breeds in sea caves and tends to stay in them when not in the sea.

The Greek poet, Homer, mentioned what is probably the monk seal in his Odyssey:
Homer, the ancient Greek poet, mentioned the Mediterranean monk seal in his epic poem, the Odyssey. In Book 4, lines 345-347, he describes the sea-monsters that inhabit the waters around the island of Pharos:

…and the great seal (phoke) was in attendance upon her from the bottom of the sea, even the seal that was wont to come forth last from his lair to bask upon the shore.


In this passage, the Greek word "phoke" is used to refer to the seal, which is believed to be the Mediterranean monk seal. It is interesting to note that the word "phoke" is also the origin of the English word "phocid," which refers to the family of true seals that includes the Mediterranean monk seal. It is worth noting that the Odyssey was written in the 8th century BCE, long before the Mediterranean monk seal became endangered. At the time, the species was likely abundant and well-known to the ancient Greeks.
It is a sign of cultural evolution that humans are now more inclined to protect endangered species than to persecute them, consequently, the monk seal population has rebounded, and they are now present in Croatia and Albania from where they had disappeared. When a female monk seal, nicknamed Argyro, who became so familiar with humans on the island of Samos that she would lounge in beach chairs and hang out in a cafe, was shot, it caused an outrage throughout Greece. In earlier times, Greek fishermen would boast that they had killed a monk seal as this was considered a good thing to do.

This cultural evolution in humans, where the primitive notion that a god had given all the animals on Earth to humankind to use or abuse as they wished, to one where we realise we all share this one planet and depend on maximising biodiversity if we are all to survive, has allowed the monk seal to reverse its cultural evolution and once again start to come out of the sea caves and appear in numbers on beaches. This is another example of how Humanism is replacing the old, harmful religious superstitions as human ethical evolution rids itself of the regressive influence of religion.

Long may this Humanist trend continue.

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Tuesday 4 April 2023

Superstition News - Why Do People Fall For Wackadoodle Ideas?

Superstition News
Why Do People Fall For Wackadoodle Ideas?

Supernatural beliefs have featured in every society throughout history. New research helps explain why

Jesus and Mo cartoon in which they discuss the loss of gaps to occupy
It seem the 'God of the gaps' explanation carries a great deal of weight, especially as an explanation for natural phenomenon such as disease, drought, floods, earthquakes, etc., in smaller societies. Only as societies get larger are these supernatural explanation used to explain man-made disasters such as war, theft, mass murders, etc.

It's also true that, while developed societies such as the USA tend to look for supernatural explanations for man-made disasters, they also, with better education tend to look to science to explain natural phenomena and less so to imaginary supernatural causes.

The result is that the search for gaps in which to sit their god becomes an obsession of those who benefit from people's superstition, such as fundamentalist televangelists and Creation cult leaders, who continually attack science looking to find gaps, either real or imaginary in which to sit their ever-shrinking god and keep the income stream flowing.

Cartoon in which the God of the Gaps is thankful for Creationists
Quite why there should be a difference between larger and smaller societies is discussed in an article by Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson, postdoctoral fellow, Kellogg School of Management, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Professor Brock Bastian, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia.

The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be read here.

Monday 16 January 2023

Creationism in Crisis - How Humans Evolved to Live in Cold Climates

Creationism in Crisis

How Humans Evolved to Live in Cold Climates
Most humans haven't evolved to cope with the cold, yet we dominate northern climates – here's why

Turku, Finland in Winter
Turku, Finland in Winter

Jarmo Piironem/Eyem/Getty Images
With the exception of only a few, relatively minor, changes to our genome, such as loss of skin pigmentation and changes to hair and eye colour, and the ingression of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, non-African humans differ little from the first Homo sapiens to venture out of Africa, where they had evolved as a tropical species. Today, humans are the only Great Ape to live outside of the tropics.

And yet we have managed to live in northern climates with shorter days in winter and sub-zero temperatures in which the earliest members of our species would probably not survive a night without special measures.

With our physical and physiological makeup differing so little from our African forebears, what has enabled us to survive in these hostile conditions to which we were so mal adapted? The answer is that an additional layer of evolution is operating alongside genetic evolution - memetic, or cultural, evolution - so-called gene-meme co-evolution.

Memetic evolution has taken us from the bands of hunter-gatherers huddled round a campfire and sheltering in caves and rock overhangs, to a modern urbanised, hi-tec species living in centrally heated buildings or dressing in warm clothing and entirely dependent on science and technology for our survival. Put us naked out in the open on a cold winter night and few of us would survive, let alone thrive, and survival without cloths and shelter would be impossible on the arctic tundra even in summer.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation, Laura Buck, Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology, and Kyoko Yamaguchi, Senior Lecturer in Human Genetics, both of Liverpool John Moores University, explain how we and our cousin species, the Neanderthals adapted to the very non-African conditions they found themselves in.

The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency; the original can be read here.

Friday 11 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - The Evolution of Modern Human Intelligence.

When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the evolution of modern intelligence
My last couple of blog posts have delt with the evolution of human cultures by a process analogous to Darwinian evolution, which follows the pattern of our physical evolution with partial divergence, remerging, and hybridization with closely related species, and how the evidence utterly refutes the narrative in the Bible and the Qur'an and shows them to be nothing more than myths made up by ignorant people.

Being entirely ignorant of earlier cultures and seeing no need to explain cultural development, the Bible's authors saw no need to even make up tales to explain it. To them, humans had aleays been as they were in the Bronze Age. We now know better, of course.

This blog looks at how the elements of modern human cultures evolved much later in our history than when we became anatomically modern. It is, of course, debateable whether we became fully modern humans without fully modern cultures.

It turns out that the reason it took so long to evolve the elements of modern cultures was that there simply weren't enough of us to produce enough innovative geniuses - the Da Vincis, Einsteins, Newtons and Darwins of their day.

One of the explanations for why Neanderthals never developed more than simple stone technology was that they existed a small, scattered bands, so any new ideas tended to remain local and not spread across the entire species. If the local group died out, its ideas and any innovations died with them. This might well have been so for anatomically modern humans.

The following article by Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology, University of Bath, Somerset, UK discusses this problem and outlines the development of human cultures. It is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Thursday 10 November 2022

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Societies Evolved

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought
The Palaeolithic Age in India
Neolithic Skara Brea, Orkney, Scotland
An illustration of an Early Neolithic settlement
Artist’s impression - Palaeolithic hunters
I wrote recently about how the simplistic view of a linear progress for human evolution is wrong, because the reality of the fossil and DNA record, of which there is a plentiful supply, is that it was confused, as side branches partially diverged, then re-joined and species such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbreed both with one another with their cousin species, Homo sapiens, and a third, as yet unidentified, species known only from DNA, and a similar process of partial or complete divergence and remerging probably occurred in Africa before H. sapiens emerged into Eurasia to meet the descendants of earlier Hominin migrations.

This, of course, is exactly what we should expect from an understanding of evolution and how it works over a large range and diverse geography.

And now, it seems the simplistic model of human cultural evolution from 'savage', through hunter-gatherer, to pastoralist and settled agriculturalist may be wrong and the reality was as confused as that of our physical evolution. This really isn't surprising, as cultural development is just as much an evolutionary process as is physical evolution.

Creationists, who must subscribe to the Bronze Age mythology in the Bible and Qur'an and so shun learning and reason, will probably find this difficult to comprehend because, while the mythmakers appreciated that they needed stories to explain theirs and other animal's origins, and even the origin of Earth itself, they were ignorant of the sociology of human cultures, other than of language.

There is the idiotic attempt to explain the origin of language with the 'Tower of Babel' myth, but cultures were simply assumed to be the primitive warring Middle Eastern tribal cultures that much of the Old Testament concerns itself with, with no attempt to explain their origins. The mythmakers knew nothing else, so assumed human culture had always been as they found it, complete with misogyny, slavery, a hierarchy of priests and irascible and vindictive, brutal ruling despots, and religious rituals to appease gods who closely resembled those ruling despots, and simply set their tales in that culture.

The view of a linear progression of human cultural development is now being challenged however, with evidence that palaeolithic cultures were as diverse as palaeolithic people.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative commons license with reformatting for stylistic consistency, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada argues that we need to revise our understanding of the evolution of human culture, in today's political climate of increasing inequality, political polarization, and climate change to understand what cultures are possible in the future. The original article can be read here.

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought


During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer societies built sedentary settlements.
Credit: Shutterstock

Vivek V. Venkataraman, University of Calgary

In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers living in small, nomadic and egalitarian bands. Later, they discovered farming and domesticated animals for food and service.

Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings of the modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex, leading to our current state of affairs.

“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian Yuval Noah Harari in his bestselling Sapiens.

A new book — The Dawn of Everything by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow — challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Palaeolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.

Today, increasing inequality, polarized political systems and climate change threaten our very existence. We need a deeper historical perspective on what kind of political world shaped us, and what kinds are possible today.

Social flexibility

orange book cover with red text reading THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY DAVID GRAEBER DAVID WENGROW
In ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ Graeber and Wengrow make the claim that Palaeolithic human societies were quite diverse.
Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from mammoth bones. At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers hoisted megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first human-built holy place.”

In Ukraine, 4,000 year-old cities show little evidence of hierarchy or centralized control. And in modern times, hunter-gatherers shift between hierarchy and equality, depending on the season.

To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually unlimited social flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark assessment about the possibility for social change in the modern world.

As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I believe both accounts miss the mark about the course of human prehistory. To see why, it is important to understand how anthropologists today think about nomadic egalitarian bands in the scheme of social evolution.

Human social evolution

In the 19th-century, anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan categorized human social evolution into three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. These correspond to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life, respectively. These so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution as a steady march of progress toward civilized life.

Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little intellectual connection between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward studying hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists developed the nomadic-egalitarian band model during a 1966 conference called Man the Hunter. According to this model, humans, prior to agriculture, lived in isolated nomadic bands of approximately 25 people and subsisted entirely on hunting and gathering.

Research since Man the Hunter has updated our understanding of hunter-gatherers.
illustration of primitive red figures on a rock background
Hunter-gatherer rock art paintings in the Vumba Mountain Range in Manica, Mozambique.
Credit: Shutterstock
Hunter-gatherers and prehistory

One assumption was that small bands consist of related individuals. In fact, band societies consist of mostly unrelated individuals. And anthropologists now know that hunter-gatherer bands are not closed social units. Rather, they maintain extensive social ties across space and time and sometimes assemble in large groups.

Hunter-gatherers are profoundly diverse in modern times, and they were in the past too. This diversity helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes the scope of social expression in human societies.

Consider nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers like the !Kung in the Kalahari or the Hadza in Tanzania. Being nomadic means it is difficult to store food or accumulate much material wealth, making social relations relatively egalitarian. Group members have equal decision-making power and don’t hold power over others.

On the other hand, sedentary societies tend to have more pronounced levels of social inequality and leave material evidence such as monumental architecture, prestige goods and differential burial treatment.

When these markers are not present, anthropologists can reliably infer that humans were living more politically egalitarian lives.

Palaeolithic politics

Human societies have generally become larger-scale and more complex over time. Popular accounts typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to “civilization” and inequality. But the shift to farming was not a single event or a simple linear process. There are many paths toward social complexity and inequality.

The Dawn of Everything, along with reviews in cultural evolution and evolutionary anthropology, suggests that complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged far before the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone Age (50,000 to 280,000 years ago).

This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be skeptical.

Complexity on the coastline

Social complexity emerged among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like southern France and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.

So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Indigenous peoples could sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even evolving complex hierarchies dependent on slave labour.

Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic along rich riverine systems or on coastlines — now submerged by sea level changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources are used in the Middle Stone Age.

Collective hunting

Collective hunting is another pathway toward social complexity. In North America, hunters cooperated to trap pronghorn antelope, sheep, elk and caribou. At “buffalo jumps,” ancient Indigenous hunters drove bison over cliff sides by the hundreds. This feat likely required, and fed, several hundred people.
aerial photo of a cliff
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff.
Credit: V. Venkataraman, Author provided
But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to full-time sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and success was probably sporadic. Most of the year these populations lived in dispersed bands.

Egalitarian origins

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years. There is little evidence of markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized inequality going back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.
That leaves a big gap. What kind of society did people live in for most of the history of our species?

There is still strong evidence that humans actually lived in nomadic egalitarian bands for much of that time. Complementing the archaeological evidence, genetic studies suggest that human population sizes in the Palaeolithic were quite low. And the Palaeolithic climate may have been too variable to permit long-term sedentary life, instead favouring nomadic foraging.

This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals. Egalitarian social life needs to be maintained through active and coordinated effort.

From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged. Our politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that diversity. Prehistory shows us that human political flexibility is far greater than we can imagine. The Conversation
Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Human culture has evolved as with other evolutionary process to suit it to particular environment conditions, and what we have today is the result, just as the genes we have today are the result of our physical evolution over time.

Religions are remnants of that cultural evolution and whilst they may had had some value in ensuring group cohesion and conformity, in modern, multicultural, multiethnic societys, they are merely divisive and destructive, just when we need to start to become more united and egalitarian if we are to survive the challenges ahead of us.

Thursday 22 September 2022

Cultural Evolution - In Chimpanzees

Chimpanzee stone tool diversity | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Chimpanzee using a stone to crack a nut
Female chimpanzee cracking Panda oleosa nuts using a granodiorite hammerstone on a wooden (panda tree root) anvil.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project


Archaeologist and primatologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, have discovered cultural differences between different groups of chimpanzees.

Ask any Creationist and they'll assure you that the fact that humans have developed art, music and architecture, to name just a few of our cultural developments, is evidence that there is something very special about humans, showing that we were specially created separate from the rest of 'creation' and given these 'gifts' to enable us to have 'dominion over the planet - which was provided for our benefit.

The problem with that argument from personal incredulity and wishful thinking, is that humans are far from being the only species to have cultures, albeit, our cultural developments of language and writing, combined with our ability to learn and recall facts, and to pass them on to our children, has enabled us to build on out innate ability to form cultural groups, to build advanced cultures. The difference is one of magnitude, not presence/absence. The analogy is with the elephant’s trunk, which is an example of variation on the same basic body plan, and so evidence of common ancestry, not special creation of elephants, although that analogy is probably too subtle for the simple binary thinking of Creationists.

The fact that our cultures have much in common with each other but vary considerably between different geographical groups is evidence of the evolutionary process involved in building those cultures. Sometimes, these cultural variations are very subtle, but most people who have been to other countries will be aware of them, especially with food, drink and language, and with little differences between driving behaviour, as I once showed with a blog post about the difference in driving customs between the UK and Naples, in Italy. What the scientists at the Max Planck Institute have discovered is that chimpanzees not only use stone tools as hammers to open nuts, but that the stone tool preferred varies between different social groups.

As the Max Planck Institute news release explains:

Thursday 23 June 2022

Evolution News - How Humans Evolved to Get Along With Neighbours

Shared grooming among bonobos is indicative of their group dynamics, which includes tolerance and cooperation.

Photo: Martin Surbeck
Bonobos’ tolerant, peaceful group relationships paved way for human peacemaking – Harvard Gazette

Despite our long history of often religiously-inspired wars, and divisions into mutually-hostile camps, humans are actually quite good at getting along with neighbouring social groups, and peace-making is generally considered a noble activity, while war-mongering is generally despised.

In this respect we much more closely resemble the peaceable bonobos with whom we share 99% of our genes, than the equally closely related chimpanzees.

Not surprisingly, because it is an innate human trait, early Christians tried to claim credit for the idea that peace-making is a skill to be admired, with "Blessed are the peace-makers". The pity is, because they only saw things in selfish terms, they made it look like something only worth doing for a personal reward and not for the greater social good, because it leads to greater human happiness. Ironically, with peace-making featuring in their Beatitudes (Matthew 5:9), it may well be the result of evolution and an indication of our common ancestry with the bonobo.

But how did we get this way?

Wednesday 4 August 2021

Refuting Creationism - Modern Humans Were Not the Only Aesthetic Species

Flowstone formation in the Sala de las Estrellas at Cueva de Ardales (Malaga, Andalusia), with the traces of red pigment.
© João Zilhão, ICREA
Neanderthals indeed painted Andalusia’s Cueva de Ardales | CNRS

One of the evidence-free claims Creationism is forced into by virtue of dogma, is that modern humans are unique in several ways that sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, as some sort of special creation; namely, sentience and self-awareness, aesthetic appreciation, and a sense of moral obligation.

However, the notion that we alone have self-awareness and are thus the only sentient species has long been discounted by animal behaviourists by demonstrating self-awareness and even complex puzzle-solving behaviour in many other, even non-mammalian, species such as octopuses, bees and several birds. But there has been an on-going debate in anthropology about exactly when aesthetic appreciation (or in lay terms, artistic appreciation and symbolism) first arose in the hominins. Until now, there were precious little evidence that anyone other than modern humans ever used symbolism and colour in any deliberate, representational way.

Now, however, a team of international scientists, including researchers from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have shown that red ochre pigments on stalactites in a cave in Andalucia, Spain, were taken there and applied deliberately on multiple occasions, at a time when only Neanderthals were present in Europe. As though, over a period of several thousand years, the site had special significance and needed regular restoration, indicating a long oral tradition lasting for a very long time.

The press release from CNRC explains:

Tuesday 14 July 2020

Civilising the Uncivilised with Humanism

Sudanese women campaigning for reforms
Sudan scraps apostasy law and alcohol ban for non-Muslims - BBC News

Good news that under Sudan's new 'reforming' Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, Sudan is abolishing many of the old Islamic fundamentalist laws of the ousted former president, Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted by a coup following street protests. Sudan is now governed by a council which includes military officers who staged the coup.

What is striking is how the laws being abolished are being replaced by more humanitarian, even Humanist laws such as one might expect to find in a modernt civilised state.

Monday 6 November 2017

Ancient Wisdom And Genetic Diversity

Neanderthal family group
Photo credit: Nikola Solic/Reuters/Newscom
Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers | Science

Two papers published a few days ago in the same edition of Science show that hunter-gatherer people, both modern human and Neanderthal, had evolved cultures which minimised the genetic risks inherent in inbreeding in the small bands of which these groups consisted.

Small groups consisting only of related extended families would have a very high probability of consanguinity and inherited recessive genes unless they had strategies for regularly introducing genetic material from other more distantly related groups.

Friday 3 November 2017

Cultural Woolly Mammoths

A mammoth tusk on Wrangel Island.
Credit: Patrícia Pečnerová
Male mammoths more often fell into 'natural traps' and died, DNA evidence suggests -- ScienceDaily:

Elephants are well known for the cultural organisation in which a matriarchal group, led by a older female who acts as a repository for group knowledge such as where the water may be found during a drought, etc. This group consists of females with their young but males, when they reach a certain age, generally fend for themselves in smaller groups or as solitary individuals often associated with but not members of a matriarchal group.

This, of course, deprives males of the protection of the group and of the knowledge and wisdom of the matriarch.

Wednesday 5 October 2016

Even Educated Bees Do It!

The buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris.
Source: Wikipedia
Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect | PLOS Biology

It's now well known that humans are not the only species capable of learning new skills and passing these on to others.

Despite the old religious-based view of humans as having a unique intelligence not seen in other animals, and thus standing us apart from the rest of 'creation', like tool construction and use and the ability to solve problems, learning and culture are now being seen in a whole range of other animals. Until now though, this had been confined mostly to vertebrates and almost exclusively to mammals and birds.

Thursday 29 January 2015

Genghis Khan And Gene-Meme Co-Evolution

Genghis Khan. Unknown artist.
Genghis Khan's genetic legacy has competition : Nature News & Comment.

A technical paper published a few days ago in the European Journal of Human Genetics shows how, at least in humans, genes can increase in frequency in a population not necessarily because they represent an adaptive advantage in their own right but because they are bound to other replicators, such as cultural memes, which give them an advantage. This linkage may be entirely due to chance.

For example, a culture which is hierarchical and expansionist, and especially where sons inherit the power, authority and privilege of their fathers, may facilitate the spread of genes carried by powerful men, especially where power gives access to females and comes with a higher standard of living so children are more likely to survive. The actual genes benefiting from this may be completely unremarkable.

This paper found that it was possible to identify a number of clusters of particular haplotype of the Y-chromosome (only carried by males and so indicating the male inheritance line). By counting the number of mutations in a given region of the Y-chromosome and assuming a regular mutation rate, it was possible to estimate the time when this variant arose in human evolutionary history. By assuming that the geographical location where most diversity was found was close to the place where the variant originated it was possible to estimate a likely place where this variant arose.
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