Page 186 - Flipping book The Adam Paradox Hypothesis - Second Edition.pdf

The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 163
Evidence: Symbols as Social Glue
Beads as belonging
At Blombos (~75–70 ka), strings of beads were not adornments but badges
of identity. Each bead marked membership in a group wider than kin.
Ritual as regeneration
As Victor Turner (1969) observed, ritual remakes society. Participation
compels belonging; it welds individuals into a greater whole. Archaeological
traces of ochre burials and cave ceremonies show ritualized regeneration of
community.
Myth as obligation
Roy Rappaport (1999) argued that myth and ritual compel belief by
embedding obligations into cosmic order. Stories told in pigment at
Chauvet or enacted in Aurignacian figurines were not entertainment but
binding contracts of trust.
Together, these systems allowed networks to scale beyond biology, creating
cooperative structures orders of magnitude larger than 150.
Threshold Connection
Before ~70 ka, small bands of humans lived within Dunbar’s limit. Trust relied
on kinship and face-to-face familiarity. No enduring symbolic scaffolding
existed to unite strangers.
After ~70 ka, the sudden rise of beads, rituals, and myths reveals that symbols
had crossed a threshold: they became permanent, standardized, and powerful
enough to bind hundreds and then thousands into cohesive networks.
This is the anthropological fingerprint of the Adamic threshold. Biology set the
ceiling; symbols broke it. The genome was ready, but only when infused with
spirit and knowledge did humans cross from fragile bands into scalable
civilizations.