It’s widely believed that humans basically lived in <200 person tribes that didn’t interact with each other too much before agriculture, so one might wonder how anything got any amount of adoption.
It’s widely believed that humans basically lived in <200 person tribes that didn’t interact with each other too much before agriculture, so one might wonder how anything got any amount of adoption.
I thought people exchange between adjacent tribes was common, which makes me suspect that the amount it time it takes to transfer innovations is actually not that long?
Yes, but: a ~200 person tribe still limits the total amount of know-how that can a given tribe can remember and pass down, and then the next tribe over has to remember most of it redundantly, rather than specializing in something else.
It’s widely believed that humans basically lived in <200 person tribes that didn’t interact with each other too much before agriculture, so one might wonder how anything got any amount of adoption.
And only about 100 years ago, humanity essentially forgot the cure for scurvy: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
I thought people exchange between adjacent tribes was common, which makes me suspect that the amount it time it takes to transfer innovations is actually not that long?
Yes, but: a ~200 person tribe still limits the total amount of know-how that can a given tribe can remember and pass down, and then the next tribe over has to remember most of it redundantly, rather than specializing in something else.
Sure; I’m not sure what fraction of the relevant innovations were additions instead of replacements (which might not impact total memory burden much).