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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 223
3. The Synchrony Problem
Culture drifts locally. Traditions rise and fall in specific groups. If culture alone
explained cognition, we would expect patchy mosaics of symbolic traditions
scattered across regions and times. But what we see is synchrony: from Africa
to the Levant to Eurasia, symbolic artifacts stabilize in the same narrow window
(~70kya).
The Drift Expectation (If Culture Alone)
Culture behaves like genetic drift:
Small groups invent something (beads, ochre use, rituals).mMost of the
time, it fades away because teaching is imperfect, or the group disappears.
Occasionally, it sticks locally, but only in patches. So if cognition were
driven only by culture (without any deeper shift in human capacity), the
archaeological record should look like a mosaic: one valley with beads,
another with ochre, another with burials, all at different times, with no
global pattern.
The Synchrony Reality (What We See)
But the actual evidence contradicts that expectation:
Around 70,000 years ago, we see a synchronized ignition. Symbolic artifacts
(beads, ochre engravings, composite tools, burials with ritual) start
appearing across continents— in Africa, the Levant, and Eurasia — all
within a relatively narrow time window. Instead of scattered sparks, it looks
like a coordinated global switch.
Why This is a Problem for “Culture-Only” Explanations
If culture alone caused symbolic thought, we’d expect:
Asynchronous sparks → some regions developing early, others later, some
never. No guarantee of convergence → one group’s innovation doesn’t
necessarily spread everywhere.
But the record shows:
Synchrony → symbolic cognition appears everywhere humans are in the
same window. That implies something deeper than just local cultural drift
— something species-wide, like a biological/genetic threshold being
crossed.
In short:
That is not drift. That is ignition.