Modern Humans: Same body, changed brain

When we left Africa we supplanted the Neanderthals and Denisovans and probably others. But before we left we were well on the way to supplanting another species: humans that looked just like us but their brains were wired differently, much more like the Neanderthals and Denisovans than like us. They lived in groups where everyone knew everyone else. Culture was static. Status was mostly in families and passed from mother to daughter.

What our species invented was to expand co-operation beyond the group where everyone knows everyone, to groups based on shared culture. This involved a lot of stuff. We see how spoken language has all sorts of sneaky idioms that make it very hard for others to come in and seem to be part of that culture. We had cultural manufacturing which required difficult skills to reproduce. We had religion, how we love to say "we are the people that believe X", where X is something that no reasonable person can believe. We had money, initially in the form of difficult collectables like shells. We had role based status as well as wealth based status as well as the continuing family (female) status.

Our new brains made us much more successful. We kept interbreeding with other humans but genes were soon weeded out if they made people who didn't fit in. Being very cooperative is great, until it isn't. See https://robertsmart.substack.com/p/human-evolution-has-the-seeds-of.

I give the link to my substack though the content is also on blogger. I am going to move to substack, even though it has its annoyances. Recently we have seen folk notice that when modern humans and neanderthals interbred about 51K years ago, most of the offspring were from male neanderthal with modern human females. Some have then claimed that this means that the females preferred neanderthal males. I posted a more plausible (to me) explanation, but to describe it I needed to get into some details which, apparently, breached blogger community standards. So errors are allowed to propagate when refutation breaches those guidelines. So please subscribe to my substack if you can cope with some racy content.