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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 125
This symbolic ignition gave humans the ability to transcend the limits of face-
to-face kinship. Beads, ornaments, myths, and rituals acted as invisible threads,
weaving families into tribes, tribes into networks, and networks into migrating
waves. Only after this ignition could human numbers expand without
collapsing under mistrust and conflict. In the APH model, cognition was the
spark; demography was the flame that followed.
This framing matters. It shifts our interpretation of the evidence. When we see
the sudden burst of population growth in genetic models, the spread of
humans across the globe in archaeological maps, and the appearance of
ornaments, settlements, and rituals in excavation sites, APH tells us not to see
demography as the cause, but as the consequence of cognition. Symbolism
scaled society; society multiplied people.
The contrast is stark if we compare our species with our closest relatives.
Chimpanzees, with whom we share 98.7% of our DNA, maintain dominance
hierarchies and small fission–fusion groups of a few dozen individuals. Trust is
personal, reinforced by grooming. Bonobos, though less aggressive, are similar
— alliances are local, maintained through face-to-face interactions. Neither
species scales beyond ~50–100 individuals. Even Neanderthals, anatomically
close to us, show limited evidence of symbolic exchange networks. Their
ornaments and pigments appear sporadically, not continuously. Populations
remained small and fragmented. They never ignited.
Humans, by contrast, broke the ceiling. Once symbolic thought took hold, trust
could be mediated by objects, gestures, and stories rather than only personal
contact. A bead could tell you who someone was. A ritual could bind a
hundred strangers into one. A myth could unify thousands across valleys and
mountains. This is the true multiplier — not mere fertility, but cognition.
In the chapters before, we traced the bottleneck — the fragility of early Homo
sapiens. Here, we follow the surge: the exponential multiplication of people and
the spreading net of social bonds. The structure of this chapter mirrors that
journey.