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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 67
If we relax the synchrony requirement and allow that some beneficial mutations
could have arisen earlier and “
waited in the background”
until others appeared,
then the mathematics shift. Under our generous assumptions, the expected
waiting time for each successful locus is ~62,500 years, and fixation requires
another ~50,000 years. Thus, accumulating 10–15 decisive loci would require
on the order of 0.6–1.7 million years.
But this outcome is not a threshold. If cognitive capacity had emerged gradually
over such vast spans, the archaeological record would show a long, smoothed
trail of artifacts: incremental improvements in tools, symbols, ornaments, and
cultural practices stretching back a million years. Instead, what we actually see is
the opposite pattern: a long silence, punctuated by a sudden, irreversible surge
of symbolic behavior after ~70,000 years ago.
This mismatch is decisive. The background-waiting scenario would predict a
gradient of cultural traces — scattered but steadily accumulating — whereas the
record shows a sharp ignition, with beads, burials, art, and myth systems
appearing almost simultaneously across wide regions. The absence of that long
artifact trail undermines the idea of slow polygenic accumulation.
In short, mathematics shows that polygenic convergence by waiting is too slow,
and archaeology shows that a true threshold event occurred. Both lines of
evidence converge: the evolutionary convergence model cannot account for
symbolic cognition, while the Adam Paradox Hypothesis explains both the
timing and the abruptness of the record.