Alternatively: "how human beings rose from the lesser hominids in 70,000 B.C.E."
There's a serious theory it was this bottleneck where humans were confined to environments without natural preditors (seaside cliffs like those near Cape Town) and where social interaction was a necessity. Those with higher intelligence, particularly social intelligence, would scored more mates in that environment. And thus we had a runaway intelligence arms race that separated modern humans from their immediate hominid ancestors.
Note that humans and Neanderthals diverged 400,000 years ago, and when they died out ~40,000 years ago, they were basically technologically and socially indistinguishable from humans.
So I'm doubtful the secret sauce of humans had its origin 70,000 years ago.
Some of this comes down to "what counts as secret souce"?
Did the "secret sauce" of mouse-gui originate in the 70s with Bell Labs or Apple in the 80s? Did the secret sauce of early aggricultural civilization (Hati, Sumer, Hindus Valley..) start the first time a person grew stuff for food or when a larger scale grain economy first emerged?
There is plenty of evidence that paleo-humans from well before that 70k ybp cutoff was special, unique in the animal kingdom. Knowing what we know about people, a lot of that behaviour was almost certainly cultural and probably language-based. Very complex tool use, hunting and gathering methods, shelters, fire. Perhaps even fire-aggriculture practices.
Regardless, 70k ybp (or 40 or 100) the "secret sauce," whatever it is, begins to yield fruit. There are artifacts with symbolic expression, what we'd call art or even politics. The human population grows. We inhabit more (almost all) ecological zones. People get everywhere, including australia by 40-50k ybp. Maybe earlier. Tool invention gets faster...
But species are to some extent artificial categories. Sapiens and Neanderthals were close. Genetically compatible and behaviorally similar (as far as we can tell). It would not be unreasonable to define them all as subspecies or ever varieties within a species.
Apart from the minor fact that until we knew some of us are descended from Neanderthal they were consider by everyone to be different species. Ideology 1, science 0.
It's impossible to deny that studies of our biology attracts a lot of interest, and we're not best placed for objectivity. That said, tghe splitter-lumper dynamic always exists. Are polar bears just big, white, aquatic brown bears that don't hibernate, or a species? New information about interbreeding should tip the balance in favour of subsceices. That's happening. Science works. I don't think there's an ideology problem here, at least not more than anywhere else.
Wolfs, dogs and coyotes interbreed, too. And coyotes have long been thought their own species. (They are quite fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf .)
Yeah, that comment started out as "anatomically modern humans" with a caveat on later interbreeding before editing; I hope the elisions were a net gain for getting the point across, if slightly less precise.
You ever met one? Had a conversation? Assessed it’s working memory, capacity for abstract thoughts and manly layered thinking?
There is a lot we don’t know. The fact that Neanderthal buries their dead with some sort of symbolism, cared for elders, and lived in (small!) groups doesn’t really give us firm answers to these questions.
Right, I've read the same. In practice they could very well have been more intelligent than humans.
One interesting idea is that humans ultimately triumphed because we had better social connections, we traveled much further and had much larger circles.
The evidence we have for Neanderthal development is subject to precisely the same limitations to the evidence we have on the development of other hominids.
If you can't meet & talk to humans from 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, are you able to say any change happened 70,000 years ago?
Surely the Neanderthals have been subject to the same selection pressure as homo sapiens throughout the aftermath of the Toba catastrophe nevertheless... No?
Assuming the bottleneck theory is valid to begin with, this was a global ecological disaster - it's not like the Neanderthals sat this one out on another planet : )
The extinction of megafauna (eg, mammoths) didn't begin until tens of thousands of years later, so the effects at northern latitudes could not have been too severe.
That is easily disproved: Khoisan people are the earliest offshoot off the sapiens evolutionary tree - they split from the rest of us cca 175 thousand years ago, and they are behaviouraly modern in all possible ways - they have large social groups, language, culture etc, which indicates those characteristics were already evolved by 175kya.
I don't think these are necessarily incompatible theories.
First, any theories about this period (the paleo revolution and/or dispersal era in a lot of theories) are very speculative and prone to change. We just don't have that much information. So, the margins are necessarily huge.
So, both these bottleneck narratives are probably over-literal reading of the data we have, at least stated in simple forms. Either way, they point to a single small seed population. There could have been many times more people (neanderthals and sapiens) at the time and later, and they just passed on far fewer genes to 100ky later.
Yuval Harari touches on the question you raise. Sapiens vs neanderthal (and others), and at one point do human behavioural characteristics (or more precisely their consequences) emerge as different. His take is (roughly):
[1] "anatomically modern" sapiens existed for 100ky+ before these behaviours emerge. [2]Findings do not imply a big cognitive or behavioural gap between sapiens and earlier subspecies in this period. [3] there appear to be botlenecks in our lineage, dating to this period [4] The "paleo-revolution" happened in some form, and he believes it was primarily linguistic [5] Our language abilities allow flexible, large scale cooperation that is unrivaled in our clade, and did not widely exist in the lower paleolithic even in sapiens [6] he spends a lot of time on the nature of those linguistic tools. In a nutshell, advanced language allows symbolism, necessary for human-level culture. Trade. Chiefs. Tribes. Gods. Money.
All that could have happened in a single cliffside cove. That seems possible.
His argument/theory is attractive, but these things are far from set in stone. New findings will force all theories to adapt. Some will become unlikely.
Certainly the game of getting smarter due to sociality had been going on for a long time before this. But it is still quite possible that something about those survivors gave them an edge in the following centuries. And since we can't see a fast change in anatomy around then, it is a fair guess that any such change was mental.
Perhaps the confinement was the part that made social interaction necessary, if humans were stuck sharing a small area rather than expanding into the neighboring territory.
There's a serious theory it was this bottleneck where humans were confined to environments without natural preditors (seaside cliffs like those near Cape Town) and where social interaction was a necessity. Those with higher intelligence, particularly social intelligence, would scored more mates in that environment. And thus we had a runaway intelligence arms race that separated modern humans from their immediate hominid ancestors.