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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 48
Part III — The Threshold of Adam
Chapter 7
Threshold Events (Not Gradual Slopes)
Threshold theory: long plateaus, sudden flips.
Introduction: The Shape of Human Becoming
By ~200,000 years ago, humans already carried near-modern bodies—tall,
gracile skeletons, large cranial volumes. Yet for ~130,000 more years the
record shows no continuous symbolic traditions: no accumulating art, ritual
landscapes, or durable myth. Then—rapidly on evolutionary timescales—
between ~70–50 kya, symbolic culture ignites and does not revert. This
looks less like a gentle slope and more like a threshold: a long phase of
readiness followed by an irreversible flip [Mellars, 2006; Mithen, 1996;
Tattersall, 2012].
1) The Cognitive Scale (Roess, 2025) → A Working Instrument
Purpose. The Roess Cognitive Scale (C0–C5), indexed to a 1–100 score for
granularity, is a model for symbolic–cognitive organization and the
archaeological signatures each level should leave (Roess, 2025). It is a
framework, not a value judgment.
Authorship note. The scale is my conceptual contribution (Roess, 2025).
Archaeological exemplars (e.g.,
“early MSA foragers”) are drawn from the
literature and used purely to illustrate the scale; they are not new excavations
[McBrearty & Brooks, 2000].