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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 73
Part III — The Threshold of Adam
Chapter 9
The Enigma of the Threshold: The Evolutionary
Account vs. APH Model
Math, lab evidence, and archaeology all show that unguided convergence cannot explain
symbolic cognition.
Introduction: The Enigma of the Threshold
Archaeology and paleoanthropology have presented us with one of the great
paradoxes of human origins. Anatomically modern humans appear in Africa at
least 300,000 years ago. Fossils such as those at Omo Kibish and Herto in
Ethiopia, or Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, demonstrate faces and brain sizes
essentially indistinguishable from our own (Hublin et al., 2017; Rightmire,
2004). These individuals, if placed among us today, might pass unnoticed in a
crowd. Yet for more than one hundred millennia, their material culture
remained strangely silent. The landscape of early Homo sapiens is marked by
stone tools of little innovation, occasional use of pigments, and burials whose
symbolic meaning is ambiguous. There is no enduring art, no sustained
ornamentation, no evidence of complex myth or cumulative ritual.
Then, abruptly around 70,000 years ago, something changes. Symbolic
behaviors proliferate and persist. Beads appear in abundance, ornaments are
standardized, burials include grave goods, cave walls in Europe and Asia are
decorated with animals and abstract motifs, figurines are carved, and
mythological imagination begins to leave permanent marks in material culture.
This threshold moment coincides with the great dispersals of humanity — to
Sahul by ~65,000 years ago, to Europe by ~45,000 years ago — and with the
rise of cumulative cultural traditions that never again vanished (Mellars, 2005;
d’Errico et al., 2003).