Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds | LiveScience - The Diigo Meta page

• 04 Aug 09
  

  Ronda Wery

  Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.\n\nA new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.\n\nThe research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.\n\n

  evolutionary_psychology sociology innovation

• 02 Jul 09
  

  Khaled Al-Sebaei

  anthropology science sociology

  • as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.
  • The idea that demography is linked to modern human behavior has been around for decades,
  • 9 more annotations...
  • • Scientists have known that anatomically modern humans, or Home sapiens, (characterized by big brains and other features we sport today), were around at least 160,000 to 200,000 years ago.
    • In fact, archaeological evidence of art and technology beyond basic stone tools doesn't appear until about 90,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa
    • "In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behavior explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence,"
    • The model revealed that at a certain subpopulation density there was an accumulation of ideas and skills. To figure out whether this phenomenon of skill-sharing was real, the team used genetic data to estimate population sizes in different regions at different times. Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there was a certain degree of migration between subgroups there was also archaeological evidence of modern human behavior.
    • "As population density increases, people migrate between groups more,"
    • "That increases the probability that any skill that's difficult to learn doesn’t get lost or decay."
    • Results also showed that population density would have dropped due to climate changes at the time when modern human behavior temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.
    • "The basic idea conceptually is you can have individuals who are really great at inventing ideas and concepts and ways of approaching the world, but you need a certain population density to be able to have that stuff catch hold and spread,"
    • "You could imagine that there may have been very innovative individuals on occasion, but with very small population sizes and mobile foragers who didn’t run into other groups very often, those innovations were probably very short-lived and almost invisible in the archaeological record."
• 26 Jun 09
  

  thepinkdolphin's diigo

  anthropology

• 25 Jun 09
  

  Yule Heibel

  Article reports on research (noted & bookmarked earlier: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/ucl-hpd060109.php) arguing the benefits of density (in early urban settings), which accelerated intellectual and cultural development.

  urbanization urban_development urban_energy cities population density

• 24 Jun 09
  

  Jonathan Green
• 23 Jun 09
  

  Lee Barry

  culture

  • ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.
  • at a certain subpopulation density there was an accumulation of ideas and skills.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • "As population density increases, people migrate between groups more," Thomas said during a telephone interview. "That increases the probability that any skill that's difficult to learn doesn’t get lost or decay."
    • "You could imagine that there may have been very innovative individuals on occasion, but with very small population sizes and mobile foragers who didn’t run into other groups very often, those innovations were probably very short-lived and almost invisible in the archaeological record."
• 07 Jun 09
  

  Howard Rheingold

  Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.
  
  A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.
  
  The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.
  
  

  evolutionary_psychology sociology innovation

  • Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.
    

    
    

    
    A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new ideas that helped make us human.
    

    
    

    
    The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science, suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.
    

    
    

  • "As population density increases, people migrate between groups more," Thomas said during a telephone interview. "That increases the probability that any skill that's difficult to learn doesn’t get lost or decay."
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • "The basic idea conceptually is you can have individuals who are really great at inventing ideas and concepts and ways of approaching the world, but you need a certain population density to be able to have that stuff catch hold and spread," Potts told LiveScience.

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