My thought for a minor caveat: there may be one or two complex mental adaptations that are not universal.
My idea here is that something changed to trigger the transition from agrarian society to industrial society. For example, maybe there’s a new brain innovation related to science, engineering, language, math, logical thinking, or epistemology.
Or not. This change could also have been driven simply by cultural memes of science and invention, after the final piece of complexity was already fixed in the population, so that if a group of children from 10,000 years ago were transplanted into today’s world, they would be just as inclined to become scientists, engineers or philosophers as modern children. On the other hand, it could also be that these children would be disproportionately inclined to become engineers rather than scientists, or vice versa. Or maybe the ancient children would have fewer independent thinkers. Or would have worse language or math talent.
My thought for a minor caveat: there may be one or two complex mental adaptations that are not universal.
My idea here is that something changed to trigger the transition from agrarian society to industrial society. For example, maybe there’s a new brain innovation related to science, engineering, language, math, logical thinking, or epistemology.
Or not. This change could also have been driven simply by cultural memes of science and invention, after the final piece of complexity was already fixed in the population, so that if a group of children from 10,000 years ago were transplanted into today’s world, they would be just as inclined to become scientists, engineers or philosophers as modern children. On the other hand, it could also be that these children would be disproportionately inclined to become engineers rather than scientists, or vice versa. Or maybe the ancient children would have fewer independent thinkers. Or would have worse language or math talent.
I see no way of testing this hypothesis though.